Preparation is king when migrating to Atlassian Jira cloud

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This is the second of seven articles bringing you through the most important and beneficial experiences we gained in out migration project that concluded May 2020. This article will outline the key learnings that we definitely would recommend you do in the test phase.

Introducing Digizuite

Digizuite is a major player in the global DAM market, providing powerful digital asset management solutions to businesses and organizations around the world.

Our software, Digizuite™, makes it easy to collaborate across departments, countries, and digital channels. Users can simply upload, edit, search, manage, distribute, and repurpose rich media content, such as images, videos, documents, and PDF files, across internal and external channels from one centralized source through automated and intelligent workflows.

Before we started

Before we even started our test phase, we decided to do some spring cleaning leaving us with less data to migration and hopefully less chance of something breaking.

We performed the following actions

• Cleanup of projects where some were deleted and others archived
• Cleanup in filters that were no longer users
• Cleanup in Dashboards
• Cleanup old SLA’s and customers in Jira Service Desk
• Clean up Workflows, workflow schemes and unused custom fields
• All was done manually and we removed a lot of data.

Learnings from these tasks

• Filters break if you delete or rename projects and will make your testing more painful or you need to review all filters before you continue to testing.
• Adding a symbol in archived project names gives a better overview. We chose a cross.

Conclusion

We did this but it was not a requirement. I might even recommend just waiting to do this at a later point as the amount of data makes no difference in the migration.

Ready to test

In coordination with the Atlassian Migration team we planned the test to be 4 weeks where we should make sure to map any changes in order to repeat when we go to production.

Key learnings from test

• Document test cases for your most important workflows
• Check information like attachments on tickets and in comments
• Check changes rights for Tempo and other plugins making sure you know what to fix when you go on production
• Deactivate e-mail notifications from the system unless its for the following test
• Log in as a migrated Jira service desk customer that has no atlassian user
• Create a new Jira service desk customer and see the flow

What would we have done differently?

• We would have performed test two times before the last migration making sure all our use cases work including users and groups
• Have the final test very close to t go-live since cloud keeps getting updated and you don’t want a 4 week gap in releases from test and production
• Manually gone through all users, their group memberships and license access and match with production. Its not enough to randomly picking 10. We had errors in approximately 10% of users post migration.

Introduction of the authors

Between the authors in this article series we have more than 40 years in IT and with more than 21 years together working with Atlassian Jira products in several organization. Introducing Jakob F. Gormsen has been working as an Atlassian Expert the last 16 years specializing in helping organizations get the most out of the Atlassian products, with a special knowledge about Jira Server. You can reach out to Jakob at https://condoctor.dk/. Henrik has mainly been a Manager and user of Jira to run Development and support. Henrik in this context is the Project Manager of the Migration project and responsible for Support and Quality in Digizuite. The reason we are writing this article series is to pass on our experiences from the process and want to help the Atlassian community get a more successful cloud migration. We have received support from the Atlassian Migrations and communications team to provide you with their initiatives to prevent the issues we experienced in the future.