Best practices for combining JIRA instances?

[Dustin-M]

We have a couple of JIRA instanaces around that have been started up by different groups. We are looking to upgrade and bring all of these instances into one JIRA solution.

I was looking for a best practices guide on how to do this and any tricks to getting it done the neatest way!

Thanks for any advice

[Martin Cooper]

If the projects use the basic generic setups and have not been heavily customised then the restore project approach as outlined above will work.

But if they haven't then you effectivley have to recreate that project in the target instance manually before you can bring any data over. Obviously this is not ideal, but at present there are not any automated solutions.

You also need to think about the global aspects of JIRA - mainly resolutions and priority's - all projects will see the same set and descriptions of these and cannot change them without impacting all other projects. Ideally would need to reach agreement between all instances and projects on their descriptions and meanings to produce a consistent set that can be used by all. But when importing a project these will all have to exist, so can end up with a large confusing list - with changes in meaning. This can be cleaned up post import.

It can often be simpler just to continue the projects afresh in the single instance, and keep the old instances for historical purposes. This would have no license implications and avoids the hassles of merging. It also worth bearing in mind that JIRA performance can degrade when it reaches 200,000 issues (lots of other variables here and things that can mitigate it), so depending on the size of your instances you could be overloading a single instance, or shortening its effective lifespan.

Hopefully you have generic instances and the project restore will work a dream for you :)

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Its pretty easy, just do XML backups of each instanec you want to merge, and import the required projects into the target instance (the importer will allow you to select). You wont be able to import when certain conditions prevail like missing custom fields, priorities etc.

A first step would be to try importing (you only have to go through the motions, just dont hit the final GO, to see what problems you may have).

Ref: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Restoring+a+Project+from+Backup