Get ready for Atlassian Data Center major upgrades

Before you upgrade, these are our recommendations

• Verify compatibility—before you upgrade, check the upgrade notes to confirm that all your essential apps and custom development solutions are compatible with the new versions. Once an app has been upgraded, you may not be able to downgrade.
• Test in a staging environment—do not deploy directly into your live production instance without testing to identify and fix breaking changes. Remember that problems are more likely to occur with major upgrades, such as the upgrade from Jira 9 to Jira 10.
• Develop a strong testing plan—create and execute an exhaustive testing plan for all functionalities to catch unwanted incidents before upgrading in production.
• Back up your data—make full backups before upgrading to guarantee system integrity.
• Talk to your Atlassian Solutions partner— if you would like extra assurance, they can assess and guide the changes for your organisation successfully.

Consider the following scenarios

• Upgrading to new versions of Jira, Confluence, or Bitbucket—this requires downtime, and usually includes notifying teams about when exactly Jira or Confluence will be unavailable. Many companies carry out updates at the weekend specifically to minimise disruption. This is common in self-hosted systems and is not unique to Atlassian products.

• Moving onto new versions as soon as possible—there will be disruption in the form of delays if you’re using apps that don’t have compatible versions available yet. If your organisation requires using the latest versions, you may find that you cannot upgrade until the apps you use are upgraded by their vendors. We understand this at The Adaptavist Group and always work to minimise the delay before products are compatible.

• Upgrading without checking for app availability—the disruption will depend on what those apps are doing in your instance, and may range from mild inconvenience to process failure. For example, if you use an app to show the escalation process for customer refunds, there’s going to be sizeable disruption. If you use an app to automate processes for creating Jira tickets, that may create disruptions within teams and how they manage their work. If you use an app to enforce regulatory steps, for example automatically locking, signing, and dating Confluence pages for auditing purposes, then there is a greater commercial risk. So it is critical to understand the impact of not having your essential apps if you choose to upgrade before those apps are compatible.

What’s next?

App availability and upgrade advice