Cleaning up workflows and schemes

[Joana Rocha]

I am cleaning up jira in order to get more flexibility when including team improvements and data. 

I started by archiving or trashing all projects that we do not use. 

Then, I cleaned up all Issue types we do not use. 

Now, cleaning up workflows and workflow schemes I am blocked. We are a small team, so I only need 3 workflows for different issue types, that can be used in all projects. 

However, each workflow has a lot of workflow schemes associated which I'd like to remove, but cant seem to find how.

This gets more complicated when the workflow schemes are associated with the projects I removed and archived still show up. So the work I started this task with is not helping in anyway. 

Any advice? 

[Ravina Mahajan]

Hi @Joana Rocha 

Have you tried the below process to clean up the workflow schemes?

All schemes associated to the archived projects are still used by those projects so you can't delete them until those schemes are disassociated from the archived projects.

So, you need to unarchive those projects and then need to update the workflow scheme by any of the 3 workflow scheme you created. you need to map the statuses from old workflow to the new workflow statues like, if old workflow is having new status and new is having todo status then you need map the status accordingly which is similar to the current workflow status which closing related with status in new workflow.

Once you associate a new workflow scheme to the unarchived project then archived those projects as a part of your clean.

Check the below document for the how to change the workflow scheme for the projects

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/add-edit-and-delete-an-issue-workflow-scheme/

Once the workflow is dis-associated from the project and not used in any project it will shown in the inactive workflows section at the bottom of the workflow page in admin section shown below

You need to follow this same process for your active projects as well and migrate those projects workflow from current workflows to the any of the 3 workflows which want to use in Jira, perform the status mapping and click of migrate.

Once all the workflows and workflow schemes are migrated all un-associated workflows and workflow schemes will be shown in the inactive section at the bottom of the page

Workflow - https://your-domain.atlassian.net/jira/settings/issues/workflows

Workflow scheme - https://you-domain.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ViewWorkflowSchemes.jspa

These inactive workflows are not associated with any projects and you can safely delete those.

Once you delete the workflows statuses which are not used in any workflow can also be available to delete as in global status page you can see if that status is used in workflow or not if it's used in any workflow delete option will not be available for those statuses and not used in any workflow delete option will be shown 

https://your-domain.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ViewStatuses.jspa

I would recommend to try this first in the sandbox instance and once you confirmed that it's working as expected and does not loss any data then you can perform the same steps in production instance

let me know if you face any issues or have any questions

Thanks

Ravina

[Vish Reddy _Revyz_]

Hi @Joana Rocha @Ravina Mahajan ,

Would love to get your feedback on our app - Revyz Data Manager for Jira. One of the functionalities present in the app is providing for an easy way to clean-up unused / unwanted objects. If you are open to it I would be happy to do a demo for you. 

One of things we also do is backup your data, just in case you deleted something which you need back, you are able to fetch that specific object back into your site from the backup data.

Thank you

Vish

[Joana Rocha]

Hi Ravina, 

Thank you so much for your answer. I should have diassociate the workflows before archiving projects then. 

One option I have is unarchive, do the clean up as you suggested, and archive them again.

Another option I'm considering is deleting these projects - they are very old and we wont reopen them again. Would that make them disappear and therefore make the workflows inactive? 

Thank you!