Upgrading JIRA Guidance

[Esther Ferguson]

Hi All,

 Our office is currently using version JIRA 7.1.4. The most current version of JIRA as of today is 7.4.3, is that correct? Even though this is the most current, I'm thinking that this would be too difficult to upgrade our office that far along, without running into issues. Would that be a correct statement?

So, what would be your proposal on our next JIRA upgrade? For example, do you recommend that we upgrade to JIRA 7.2, and then to 7.3? Obviously, we want to upgrade to the highest level of JIRA, without having any issues :-)

Please advise and if you have a JIRA Upgrade Checklist document or any additional links that we can review, that would be extremely helpful?

As far as our environment, would it be better to create a new VM or just upgrade the current exisitng VM that our JIRA 7.1.4 is currently running on?

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Esther

[Sebastien Jacques · Accepted solution]

@Esther Ferguson,

I have only upgraded to 7.3.2 and the only constraint was to step to 7.0 and 7.1 (from 6.4). There should be no issue upgrading from 7.1.4 to 7.4.3 according to JIRA Software 7.4.x upgrade notes.

If you use add-ons, you should review the upgrade notes for the add-ons. The best approach I found so far is to upgrade the add-ons to their latest version. Then restart JIRA in 'Safe Mode' (disabling add-ons) before the upgrade. You really need to test drive the upgrade in a test environment.

[Esther Ferguson]

Thank you!

[Sue Bridges]

Hi Sebastien,

I have JIRA 6.4.11 (Oracle 11) and want to upgrade to the latest JIRA 7 (.5 it seems as of today).  Due to the Oracle version, I will have the 7.x JIRA on a different Server so that it can use Oracle 12.  Have you a checklist for this migration and upgrade?  Or, at least what you did you do from 6 to get to 7?  Why the step from 7.0 to 7.1?

Thanks

Sue

[Alfredo Negrete]

Esther, 

I'll be going through a similar upgrade of moving from 7.0.11 to 7.5...were you able to find an upgrade checklist?

[Esther Ferguson]

Hi Fred,

No checklist was provided, so I landed up creating our own. We were able to sucessfully upgrade to 7.5 last Friday, with no issues. Essentially, here's the steps we followed:

1) Performed a full backup of our JIRA db, which we have automated

2) Sent out communication that JIRA was going to be down for maintanence (set a 2 hr. window)

3) Took a VM snapshot of our server with JIRA 7.1.4 on in case we had to roll back

4) Upgraded to JIRA 7.1.10

5) Validated all was working with no issues - server, validated # of add on plug ins & if they were working, permissions, etc. If we had a NO GO because of any major issues, we would have rolled back at this point

6) Once we had a GO, we upgraded to JIRA 7.5 

7) We then performed the same validataion checks, server, add ons, permissions, etc.

8) When the JIRA 7.5 upgrade was complete, there were 3/4 add in plug ins that said that they were incompatible with the newer version of JIRA, but they still worked fine. I think in time, those will be updated as well

9) We had a few users also do testing and all was good.

10) So then, we sent out another communication to our team(s) that JIRA 7.5 upgrade was complete and users were good to begin using JIRA and to report any issues that are detected to our server team (no issues to date, thank goodness!)

After the JIRA upgrade, you are also provided a nice JIRA Upgrade Summary report that you can review in more detail..

Good luck with your upgrade!

Hope this helps,
Esther

[Chaitanya]

Hi,

Do you have similar sort of steps for Jira 6.4 to Jira 7.0. Thanks in advance.