Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 10. Migrating Data into JIRA

Overview

This chapter describes how data is migrated into JIRA from other systems, along with suggestions for how to estimate the effort involved in a migration. The short answer is more than is usually expected.

The source system is the system where the data currently is (e.g., Bugzilla, Rally, or even another instance of JIRA). The words migration and import tend to be used interchangeably. If there is a difference, JIRA has import tools, but the whole process is called a migration. A merge is just a migration that leaves existing data unchanged.

Tip

New JIRA administrators sometimes ask Can I synchronize the source system and JIRA, so I don’t have to do a single large export and import? Synchronization is a lot more work since it has to handle configurations in both systems changing over time. Instead, I recommend migrating the data once and then making the source system available in a read-only mode for a period after the migration to make testing easier. It’s also an incentive to move everyone onto a single system together.

Migrating Data from JIRA to JIRA

JIRA comes with the ability to import a JIRA project from a complete XML backup of a difference JIRA instance. This feature can be found at Administration→System→Project import. However as the feature’s documentation at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Restoring+a+Project+from+Backup says, restoring a project from a backup is not a trivial task.

The problem is that the target ...