You can skip this step if your trial goal is to demonstrate Jira's agile project management capabilities which makes migration of historic or current ClearQuest content unnecessary.

However, in most other cases, you might want to demonstrate a Jira pilot instance that contains real business data from your ClearQuest system. To achieve this, you have three main options:

Manually create issues in Jira

For a manual population step, you can leverage the same steps as for the CSV importer but replace the actual CSV import procedure with a manual issue creation run.

When tackling more than 20-30 issues to be created, it is also possible to create a data collection sheet with a spreadsheet application. You can then export that collection sheet to CSV which you can then import using the CSV importer. The best way to perform this is to create a couple of issues in Jira first, export them to Excel and then add more rows using the existing field values. This way, you could minimize problems during the importing procedure.

Import via CSV

Alternatively, you are also able to export the records from your ClearQuest instance and import the resulting data dump using the CSV Importer Add-on in Jira. The Importer Wizard lets you map each source field with the respective standard and custom fields in Jira. Additionally, the wizard lets you map value pairs as well which enables you to translate versions, issue types and other standard fields as well.

To ensure a smooth transition, we would recommend the following migration process:

1. Export the range of records in ClearQuest into a CSV file
2. Analyze the CSV file in Excel and mark for every field
   1. Whether you desire to maintain it in Jira
   2. The matching field in Jira
   3. The type of field and allowed values
   4. If it is a controlled list field such as component or version, lay out all possible values of that field. You can do that easily in Excel by making a pivot table of that column and display all possible values and their occurrences. Mark which of these possible values should exist in Jira and plan respective versions, components or values in custom fields.
3. Create the project in Jira and create fields and custom fields as required by your reviewed CSV export
4. Once you can confirm that all fields and possible values (such as versions, components and statuses) exist in the Jira project, you can commence with the CSV import.

For more details, please see the CSV importer documentation

Jira importers for ClearQuest by our Experts

After performing dozens of ClearQuest to Jira migrations, a number of our Experts have developed tools to automize the specific process to move content between these two systems. For more information, see Apps for migrating content from ClearQuest to Jira.

Customized migration scripts

In case of heavy customization and integration of your ClearQuest instance, as well as a very large issue base (>100,000 records), a more customized migration might be an option. Such a path would involve jelly scripts that would directly access the Jira API and write directly to the database. Scenarios could be the desire to preserve application links, attachments, changset links or respective change histories to 3rd party systems. We would only recommend going forward with this option together with an Expert.