Transitioning to Jira

[andy]

We've been working with an agile development process for a while now. However, have been using an alternative to Jira called AHA. Now that we are looking to transition to Jira, I wonder if there are ways that people have onboarded their data; tickets, releases, commentary and documentation from third party sources. Are there any ways people have tried to automate the process of uploading data in bulk into Jira.

#Newhere #HelpNeeded. 

[Alex Gallien]

Hey Andy, I've done a few similar migrations, and it really comes down to the complexity of your data. I haven't used AHA, but assume you could export the data into a CSV somehow? If so you can import your data via a CSV file. For smaller numbers of issues (<5k or so) this works fairly well.

For more complex integrations you probably are going to want to make use of Jira's REST API, running a script to copy the data over. You can either iterate over a source file (also likely a CSV) or use some middleware to facilitate copying the data over from one system to another.

If you're on-prem, do not attempt to do this via the database. Just trust me, it's a huge pain and will only result in sadness.

[John Funk]

Hello and Welcome, Andy!

We are glad you are here!!

[andy]

Thanks John, 
I appreciate the warm welcome! 

[Taranjeet Singh]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community, @andy ! Hope you get to learn a lot about Atlassian tools here!

[Erica Moss]

@andy Welcome, welcome!

[Steve Mandeli]

Interesting. We have Jira and will add AHA, which they want to communicate with Jira. Added to that, we have a ServiceNow ticketing system.

You can bulk upload or export to/from Jira using CSV format in Excel spreadsheets. When uploading, I believe the limit was 2000 records at a time. I exported data from another tool and imported into Jira. I used a lot of VBA code to convert data. The effort took months. But VBA can possibly help you.

[andy]

Hi @Steve Mandeli 

Aha is great. However we're not using the business management / road map capabilities as much as we are the releases / features / ticketing etc. So with a price change coming on our subscription, we're looking at Jira as the alternative. 

[Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__]

Welcome on the community @andy :)

[LarryBrock]

Hi @andy and welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I believe you'll find Jira to be a much better solution for tracking software development  management tool than Aha!  Aha! has strengths in the Product Management space but Jira Software and Jira Service Management are far superior in the SDLC and ITSM spaces.

More specifically to your question, Jira has excellent import capabilities using either CSV or JSON formatted data.  Here's a link to documentation on the topic:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/migrating-from-other-issue-trackers-938847532.html
(note there's a selector on the top right for cloud or on-prem version which can alter the content)

If the job becomes too complex, there is great help available here in the Atlassian Community and there are also a number of solution partners that can provide assistance from general guidance to turnkey delivery.

Cheers!