Case Study: Atlassian Jira Migration

// Case Study

Atlassian Jira Migration for US Based Software Company

Business Requirement:
The Client had multiple / disparate instances of Atlassian Jira running, which they obtained from acquisitions, mergers and needed to consolidate their Jira instances.
Summary:
The Client is a global software company, who grew to become a global conglomerate by multiple mergers and acquisitions throughout the time.
Challenge:
Client was looking for migration / consolidation of existing Jira Instances to a single instance of Jira version 7.3.8 for reducing license and maintenance cost, procured plugins cost, operating system, database, hardware costs, etc., Apart from this, Jira 7.3.8 enhanced features will enable client to accelerate deployment, enhance usability, improve user acceptance and satisfaction.
Following are some of the advantages in this migration / consolidation:
  • Current version of scrum and kanban boards built into Jira Software, not a separate plugin.
  • Current release has new hub dashboard, redesigned sidebar, improved reporting and visibility on code reviews, build statistics, and users will be able to have shared configurations for the projects with rich text editor and delegated workflow management.
Solution

Client has been using Jira for many years for many of their software engineering teams for their projects, their instances grew as the teams grew and with mergers and acquisitions. The business requirement was to consolidate all of them under one umbrella without losing the users, user privileges, team structures, lists and issues with the proper hierarchy of tree.

Client was considering to migrate their existing Jira instances on their own, without success, due to several errors that occurred during the attempted migration client contacted TechTiera for this engagement. Along the way, they engaged TechTiera and have overcome several challenges; these include recompiling & redeployment of in-house developed plugins, consolidation of existing Jira Instances to a single instance of Jira version 7.3.8 will have approximately 18k user’s, more than 1500 projects and 13 million issues in total. As client is running in the upper limits of the enterprise scale TechTiera recommended to go with Jira Data Center. Jira Data Center allows the Jira application to be clustered in a multi-node cluster where all nodes are active. This means that with a load balancer in front you can distribute the load across multiple nodes thereby increasing throughput when compared to a single server handling the same load.

Overall, our approach incorporated the following elements:
  • Careful assessment of add-ons and customizations to be migrated.
  • Configuration of Jira’s workflows and custom fields in target system.
  • Extracting data from source system.
  • Transform & prepare data and building custom scripts for loading the data to target system.
  • Validating data migration.
  • Replicating the migration steps in production environment, followed with testing of the system, user acceptannce test, signoff, user training and knowledge transfer.
The entire migration was completed in record time and TechTiera is currently supporting and maintaining their Jira instances along with other Atlassian toolstack in their environment.
Benefits to Client:
  • Consolidated Confluence Instances.
  • Reduced Licenses & Maintenance Costs, Plugins Costs.
  • Reduced Costs on Hardware, Databses and Operating Systems Costs.
  • Significant Cost Savings on Support and Maintenance.
  • Completed the Migration in record time.