It’s been over a month since we deployed JIRA as our issue tracking tool, replacing IBM Rational ClearQuest.
It took me a few months to prepare for this move. At first I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some very needed changes in our issue tracking processes, but later on I realized it would be too much for the users, to handle both a new tool as well as major process changes.
Hence, the guiding concept for this migration was: let’s make it as close to our ClearQuest schema as possible (fields, workflows, screens, etc.). Then, as time goes by and we get to know JIRA better, we can make any changes we want to improve the process.
One exception to this was later added – try to adhere to JIRA’s ‘vanilla’ objects (fields, states, etc.) as much as possible. This is because many charts, reports, add-ons (e.g. GreenHopper) and other items expect certain fields or statuses to be present in order to utilize them properly.
Here’s how I prepared the migration:
Adventures in SCM 