Importing Projects into Jira-Agile

[Rich Baldwin]

Our group is considering moving from an existing project tracking platform (custom built). We have about 500 existing projects which we need to set up in Jira. Whats the best way to do this ? Hopefully there is an automated solution ?

thanks,

rich

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The "best" way very much depends on the structure of the data you currently have, how you would like to map it into JIRA and what format you can get it out of your current system in.

JIRA has some importers, and there's always scripting.  If your issue data could be as simple as a giant spreadsheet, you could keep it as simple as CSV, but I'd guess it's not that simple and you probably want to do something more complex.  

You could also write something external that pokes it in over REST, the CLI plugin, or Jelly.  You could even try to transform it into JIRA shaped XML or even SQL (neither of which I'd recommend because they are likely to be a lot more work than any other method)

And, of course, a mixture of the above might work too.  CSV to import the basics follwed by REST updates to add the remaining data has worked for me a couple of times.

In short, you have a really good question, but the answer is "could you give us some detail on the complexity/volume of your data?" 

[Rich Baldwin]

Thanks, Nic. I think our project data could easily be as simple as a big spreadsheet. (Current system is in Oracle, so getting the data out is fairly straightforward.) Its not terribly complicated, basically a long list of Project Names and JIRA project keys, and maybe a few things like dates. But I think its all flat, nothing terribly complicated wrt the data structure itself.

I looked through the online docs regarding CSV imports, but I could not find anything about importing projects, only Issues.If you can point me to something that would be a big help.

Similar for REST. When I've attempted to POST a new project over REST, I get back 'method not allowed', which I assume refers to the POST method. Again, nothing that I can find in the docs about POSTing a new project - if you know of something I can read I'm happy to start there.

Once the projects are there, we also have a flock of Issues to be loaded. But I've been pretty successful creating new Issues via REST, so I think I've got that part under control.

Appreciate the quick response, let me know if I can provide any more details.

thanks,

rich

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Well, a project is actually quite a small thing - it's little more than a container that says "issues here have these common properties". The problem with that is that a JIRA project is a JIRA specific thing - it's unlikely that your data will contain anything at a project level that JIRA would recognise as project specific. It does need a project key (if you want to import into several projects at once, give it a column with project key definied and it will split the issues into different projects). You can also specify components and versions at a project level (include these in the data and the import can add them to the project as it finds them). Other than that though, a project is made up of selected schemes you pull from the global lists of schemes - a notification scheme, an issue type scheme, etc etc etc. I'm not sure what you'd be trying to import on that side.