Chapter 8. Planning a JIRA Upgrade

Overview

Atlassian has released two new versions of JIRA each year for some years now. Recent releases and their dates are listed at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+Release+Summary and include:

  • JIRA 6.0—May 2013
  • JIRA 6.1—September 2013
  • JIRA 6.2—February 2014
  • JIRA 6.3—July 2014
  • JIRA 6.4—March 2015
  • JIRA 7.0—End of 2015

Major versions such as 6.3 and 6.4 are supported for two years after the first release of that version. For example, JIRA 6.4 was released on March 17th, 2015, so it will be supported by Atlassian until March 17th, 2017. This is a change from an earlier policy that supported versions until two years after their final patch release. The current end-of-life details for JIRA and other Atlassian products are available at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Support/Atlassian+Support+End+of+Life+Policy.

All of this means that upgrading JIRA on a yearly basis is a common practice. The process of upgrading JIRA is complex enough to warrant having a chapter dedicated to it, especially since doing it once per year is just long enough to mislay your notes from the last time you did the same job. The Atlassian documentation about upgrading JIRA starts at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Upgrading+JIRA and lists a number of different approaches. This chapter describes an upgrade procedure that corresponds most closely to Upgrading JIRA Manually and can be used over and over—though of course, it also depends on the ...

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