Dozens of our customers have made the move to completely migrate from ClearQuest to Jira. Many of them have imported their entire defect database into Jira and configured workflows, schemes and fields to perfectly match their business processes. Yet, especially in the beginning, when the organization is still evaluating a new tool or even later on, co-existence is absolutely a viable option. For this cookbook, we list four different scenarios:

Co-exist with ClearQuest/ClearCase in production

In this scenario, your organization's main branch of development remains on the Rational product suite. However, new projects, for example the development of entirely new products are tracked in Jira. One common scenario is the introduction of Jira together in accordance with the adoption of agile methodology. These projects would work with Atlassian's Jira Agile built on Jira and most likely run on a newly installed source control system such as Subversion or Git.

On the business side, it is already worth migrating one project over to a new Jira instance. That way, you would be able to remove 2 floating ClearQuest licenses which would free more budget than you would need for a hundred user licenses for Jira (Or 50 users if you want to include Jira Agile). As a result, this scenario already supports the trial goal to decrease costs.

Co-exist with ClearQuest as archive and keep ClearCase

There might be the situation that your organization is running projects on ClearQuest that have a long history and very high degree of customization. If additionally, there is very low activity on these projects, then the effort to migrate these projects including their history to Jira might not be justifiable. In these cases, you can keep these projects in ClearQuest and at the same time reduce the number of floating licenses drastically as all active projects are migrated to Jira.

Co-exist with ClearCase

If your organization has made the decision to move off ClearQuest but keep ClearCase for source code management, then it is possible integrate both applications using Fisheye. However, after version 2.7 of Fisheye, the integration is not supported by Atlassian anymore. If you still wish to pursue this option, then we would be happy to refer you to one of our Experts.

Total migration

Migrating off ClearQuest and ClearCase together provides the organization with the highest flexibility to select a new solution. Organizations of all sizes are making a switch from ClearCase to alternative Source Control Management (SCM) systems such as Subversion, Git or Perforce. An often stated decision factor are for example the lower administration effort and lower costs, the flexibility, ease of use and openness of the system (SVN itself is open source). With this move, many companies take the opportunity of the ClearCase migration to also re-evaluate their change management / issue tracker system.

Today, projects like the Apache projects show that Subversion is able to handle the largest of software projects. Many of our Experts have built considerable experience and tools to support such a migration.

Next to other commercial products such as Perforce, Git has evolved into an increasingly popular alternative within the last years. Git is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) and although first leveraged by smaller teams, enterprise organizations are now adopting it further. Atlassian fully supports Git and has released its own enterprise-grade Git management tool: Bitbucket (previously known as Stash, and first released May 1st, 2012).

More information:

• Further ClearQuest / Subversion comparison
• Best practices for ClearQuest to Subversion migration
• Polarion's free migration tool from ClearCase to SVN