Prepare for the cleanup
One of the biggest challenges for cleaning up your site is deciding where to start, and what can be removed. For a large instance, this could take quite some time.
1. Audit your instance and establish quick wins
So it’s a good idea to start with a thorough audit of your instance. You might want to check for the following things:
Jira
How many custom fields you have and how many of those are empty or unused?
How many inactive users have you got?
Are all your user groups necessary or maybe there are duplicates?
Are there projects that have not been updated for at least 2 years?….
Confluence
- How many spaces do you have?
- Are there spaces that have not been updated in the last 2 years?
Are there personal spaces belonging to deactivated users?
- Are there very large attachments that are no longer needed?
Bitbucket
- How many inactive users have you got?
- Are there stale branches that could be deleted?
- Are there inactive repositories that are taking up disk space?
- Are there Git tags that are no longer needed?
When you have that, think what are the quick wins that are going to bring the most user value with minimum or little effort. An extensive cleanup project takes time, and might interfere with regular user activities that’s why it might be a good idea to clean up step by step. In this way users start to see the value of the project and can accept changes and temporary inconvenience more readily.
2. Understand proceses and baselines
After you have audited your instance and know what areas need to clean up, you need to create some rules for the upcoming cleanup so that your team has a common understanding what to keep and what is redundant. Review the following questions:
- What’s your organization’s retention period? → Establishing that will help you decide on the policy to archive issues and projects.
- What constitutes a valid user group? → Establishing that will help you decide which user group to keep
- What is your criteria for granting permissions? → Establishing that can help you decide which groups to keep and help clean up permission schemes (Jira)
- What is your baseline for keeping / deleting a custom field? → This will help you get rid of unused custom fields (Jira)
- What constitutes a project? → This will help you clean up projects and project schemes (Jira)
- What is your criteria for obsolete content? → This will help you decide which spaces or repositories can be archived or removed. (Confluence and Bitbucket)
- Think of other criteria that are applicable for your instance.
3. Communicate with teams
Administrators, team leads and project, space, and repo admins can help you determine what needs cleaning and identify the entities that are redundant. Notify them about the planned cleanup and reach out to them to help you achieve the task.
Cleanup often results in changes that affect the whole organization and multiple processes, so it’s a good idea to inform your users upfront.
4. Prepare for the cleanup
You might want to inform users that changes are coming. It’s also a good idea to get stakeholders' buy-in so that you can dedicate your time to your project.
Start step by step and clean up one area at a time. When you do so, take notes, and try to think ahead - the project is not only about cleaning the instance but maintaining the order in the future. Try to think about how to change the process and what rules to establish to keep the mess at bay.
5. Create a backup of your instance and make changes in test first
To stay on the safe side, it's a good idea to back up your data. Learn how to:
We also recommend running any changes in a test environment first before applying them in production.
All done? Start your cleanup process for