A successful migration requires a lot of effort. Once you’ve migrated, take some time to appreciate your and your teams' work throughout this process. Well done, you!

But your migration journey doesn’t start with the migration itself. And it isn’t over when the migration’s complete.

The migration itself is vital, but don’t overlook the importance of your pre-migration and post-migration process. We’ve put together some helpful tips for making your entire migration journey a smooth one!

Tip #1 - Pre-migration cleanup

The pre-migration stage is the right time to clean up your data, determine your goals and migration path, gather stats and data, and more.

The factors that may affect the length and complexity of your migration include the amount of data you need to move and the processes you already have in place. You can reduce the scope of your migration by merging duplicate settings and custom fields with related functions, eliminating unused schemes and configuration objects, and reviewing inactive workflows.

Also, remember that your migration will get longer and more complicated the more data you need to move. That’s why it's important to clean up, organize, and optimize as much as possible before the migration starts.

Use this Jira migration checklist to start your migration off right!

Tip #2 - Archiving projects

Once you start your cleanup, you probably notice that certain projects are out of date or no longer needed. To speed up the migration process and avoid clutter in the new instance, you’ll want to archive these projects. This will give you more visibility and clarity into your existing projects, improve the usability of data management, and make projects easier to locate.

How do you archive projects?

Jira Cloud Premium, Jira Cloud Enterprise, and Jira Data Center have a built-in project archival function. The Projects administration page is where you can use the archive feature. To hide the project from view and move it to a new page named "Archived projects," just click the ellipses icon and choose the "Archive" option.

You can also use third-party apps like Power Scripts (PS) or Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ).

Power Scripts enables you to automate your cleanup. For example, if you want to automatically remove old projects that have been inactive for a year, PS can help you identify those. It will then notify the project owner and, once they approve, auto-archive those old projects.

You can also use CMJ to export full projects to an archive server, and delete them from production. This will further improve your system performance.

Tip #3 - Health and performance tests

Make sure that both your source and target applications are healthy and error-free before migration. Health and performance tests provide information about the system's stability, help you to address any problems and errors beforehand, and fix them so you don’t migrate broken objects. It also guarantees optimal performance post-migration.

To perform these tests you can use the instance health check function, part of the built-in Troubleshooting. To access this, visit Admin > System > Troubleshooting and support tools.
To do an Integrity Test, run Jira’s built-in Integrity Checker feature. It will check for issue, search, permission, and workflow problems. To access, visit: Admin > System > Integrity checker.
- You can also download the Integrity Check for Jira app from the Atlassian Marketplace to perform configuration error detection. This app’s designed to help you detect and easily resolve errors across all configuration elements, and it’s a great complement to the native Jira integrity Check function. After installing, you can access it from Admin > Configuration Manager > Integrity Check.

A variety of help is available to load and/or stress a server or application. Here is a list of some of the apps you might use to do your own performance testing.

Remember that when conducting a Performance Test, you should look out for problematic behaviours linked with REST API, running reports simultaneously, intensive background processes, etc.

Tip #4: Post-migration troubleshooting and disaster recovery

With some preparation (and a little luck), you can minimize mishaps during your migration. But just in case something goes wrong, you’ll want to be ready. Preparing a fallback strategy beforehand is critical, but you also need a post-migration disaster recovery plan.

A plan like this guarantees that, in the event of any unplanned problems or malfunctions during the transfer, such as data loss or system outages, you can recover quickly. So when you encounter any issues after migration, consider whether to stop, roll back, or troubleshoot the issue.

If an emergency arises, you’ll need to act fast and modify your action plan. You can quickly import/export missing data using tools like Jira CLI or Power Scripts and troubleshoot any issues in bulk and perform disaster recovery, even in complex situations.

Tip #5: Post-migration training and testing

To demonstrate changes, use a side-by-side comparison that shows what’s changed. The comparison may include showing how to log in, explaining any process or naming differences, or discussing which projects were archived or are no longer available. Make sure you remind users to check their filters, dashboards, and boards and specify where to report any questions or problems encountered.

Tip #6 - Implementing a data retention policy

Data retention is the process of keeping data for a predetermined amount of time. There are several good reasons to do this, like data analytics, business continuity, and legal compliance. It also prevents numerous dangers like information loss or theft, a significant backlog of documents, lost time and space of internal record-keeping processes, and a lack of an organization system, which results in difficulties in locating records, etc.

Power Scripts (mentioned above) may come in handy to help you adhere to your data retention policy and automate the process.

Setting up a clear data retention policy with specified timeframes after which you archive old projects helps reduce technical debt and maintain a clean instance.

For example, you can define that projects that have been inactive for more than 12 months need to be archived. Therefore, rather than evaluating your instance by hand, you can use Power Scripts to scan your projects, alert the project owner and administrator if a project is not updated for ten months, and inform them that the project will be automatically archived after two more months of no activity.

Tip #7: Standardizing project templates

For our last tip, we’ll focus on standardizing project templates. This offers a variety of benefits that include reducing the guesswork and manual motions associated with project setup, improving efficiency, streamlining workflows, providing consistency, and maximizing efficiency and accuracy, among other things.

Project templates can be as simple as pre-defined documents that outline the sections, headings, and other elements of a project. We suggest you start with three project templates:

one for development projects
one for support projects
and one for task-based projects

You can use Jira’s built-in templates or configure your own with the help of an app like Delegated Project Creator for Jira.

Conclusion

Now you’re ready to master your migration from beginning to end…and beyond! Make sure to lay the groundwork before you start your migration to save yourself as much time (and stress) as possible. If you want to get more in-depth information on the migration process, we’ve got lots of resources for you. Here are our top picks:

The Ultimate Guide to Jira Migrations is an up-to-date guide that includes case studies and best practices, screenshots, tables, and worksheets, but also definitions and terminology to make sure you know all the ins and outs of migrating.

You can also look into our Jira migration best practices Q&A with a top industry expert Rachel Wright, who specializes in Jira. In the Q&A we cover the topics of preparing for a migration, the process, and the post-migration stage too.

Happy migrating!

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