Is there a detailed and complete Product Upgrade Matrix for Atlassian products, that tells me from what version I can directly upgrade to a newer one?
Asked by Thomas Wendel:

Most Confluence and JIRA upgrades are quite straight forward. But when you have to upgrade from an older product, you have to read through a lot of upgrade notes to find out wheather you need to upgrade to an intermediate version of a product first (please see the [Confluence Upgrade Notes Overview](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Upgrade+Notes+Overview "Confluence Upgrade Notes Overview")).

Is there a detailed and complete **Product Upgrade Matrix** for Atlassian products, that tells me from what version I can directly upgrade to a newer one?

Thanks,

Thomas


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I'm afraid there isn't one. I'm not sure you could actually create one that would be useful either. Whilst I like the basic idea, let me explain with an example.

My current client had two Jira installs, both 3.12, but owned by different teams. Simlilarly, they both had Confluence 2.9. One team had no problem updating to Jira 4.0, and the other had an absolute nightmare and ended up going via 3.13. It was the other way round for Confluence going to 3.4.

In other words, the matrix wouldn't be accurate for us. There's simply too many configurations that might or might not work to boil down to a really simple matrix.

comments: author: Ruchi Tandon
body: I am not sure Nic if I completely agree.We have standard products and the upgrade should also be straight forward. The upgrade matrix should just be able to say that if you are on version "x" then you need to upgrade to version "y" before upgrading to "z". This is a simple way of saying the same thing as is mentioned in our installation guide as well. Its just a way of summarizing.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I know, that's why I think there isn't one yet. I really do think it's a useful idea. Especially if you could include Jira + Greenhopper

I'm just unsure about how easy it would be to create. You would have to surround it with caveats that you're only talking about core Atlassian releases, like Jira standalone/WAR, plus one of the supported databases, but no plugins or code changes.

In the example I gave, you'd end up with people saying "But Atlassian said it would work" or "your matrix is wrong because it doesn't work (for us)"


author: Thomas Wendel
body: Sorry for not getting back to you both for such a long time. I went through my open questions and stumbled over this one. I was still hoping that Atlassian would come up with such a matrix since I still think it would be helpful.

Nic, I totally agree with you: No two installations are the same and even though the installation and update process gets easier all the time, sometimes something just goes wrong during an update. Even though you followed the best practices and did it the exact same way as you have done many times before. Not to mention when there are plugins and special hacks and tweaks involved.

However, an update matrix can still point out the intermediate steps you have to take when you upgrade. Especially when the application is rather old (for example if you wanted to upgrade from Confluence 2.2 to 2.8, you had to upgrade to 2.7 first. In order to go from 3.4 to 4, you need to upgrade to 3.5 first).

Such a matrix would not necessarily say "But Atlassian said it would work". Atlassian strongly mentions to back up everything prior to an update, which suggests already: Stuff can go wrong.

Again, thank you both for answering.  

Cheers,  
Thomas


author: Jeremy Largman
body: My 2 cents - I think Nic is right. The version number isn't the problem. The exception to this is if you're upgrading before Confluence 2.8, for which you need to go to Confuence 2.7 first, although even that has some configuration tricks to get around it.

Have a look at the number of knowledge base articles we have around upgrades over at [Troubleshooting Upgrades](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Troubleshooting+Upgrades) (you can also expand the section under 2.8 to see what I'm referring to above). That page has ended up being a dumping ground for troubleshooting once you have an error message, since anticipating what one-off issue might go wrong in advance became too difficult. None of those issues happen all the time, and all of them happen sometimes. My point is (as Nic's), a pro-active prevention technique wouldn't get all the little one-off configurations. I wish it were as simple as a matrix, but I could never boil it down to that.

As for JIRA, the two real changes were in JIRA 4.0 (lots of changes) and JIRA 4.3 (user management).

Typically, Confluence is the more complex in an upgrade.


Tags: jira

upgrade