JIRA Agile 6.4 Upgrade Notes
Before you begin
Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of JIRA Agile after we have released the software. In these cases, we publish information about the known issues in the JIRA Agile Knowledge Base. Please check for known issues and follow the instructions as necessary.
What do I do if I have problems with JIRA Agile?
If you have problems when installing/upgrading JIRA Agile or using it after an upgrade, please contact our support team. This is the fastest way to get your problems addressed. The support team can work with you to figure out what is going wrong, and if there is a bug with JIRA Agile, they will escalate it to our development team.
Important notices
If you are using JIRA Server 6.0 (or earlier) with an Oracle database, do not upgrade to JIRA Agile 6.4. There is a critical issue with this particular setup that severely affects performance.
- If you have already upgraded to JIRA Agile 6.4 with JIRA 6.0 Server and an Oracle database, contact support for assistance.
- If you are using JIRA Cloud, this does not affect you.
- If you have JIRA 6.0 Server and an Oracle database, and you want to upgrade to JIRA Agile 6.4, you need to upgrade your JIRA instance to JIRA 6.1 (or later) first.
General upgrade instructions
- Read the notes on this page:
- Follow these instructions to upgrade JIRA Agile:
- If you are using JIRA Agile with JIRA Server, upgrade via the JIRA Plugin Manager.
- Note, if your JIRA instance cannot access the internet, download the add-on separately (from the Atlassian Marketplace) and install the add-on file by upload, as described here: Installing Add-ons.
- If you are using JIRA Agile with JIRA Cloud, subscribe to our blog for the latest updates (see this page for instructions). Please note that JIRA Agile may be released for JIRA Server several days before it is updated for JIRA Cloud. To find out what version of JIRA Agile is running in JIRA Cloud, see Application Versions.
- If you are using JIRA Agile with JIRA Server, upgrade via the JIRA Plugin Manager.
Upgrading from JIRA Agile 6.3 to JIRA Agile 6.4
(Important) Changes to the Rank field
We have made a number of changes to the Rank field in JIRA Agile to support upcoming JIRA features. You shouldn't notice any difference in how the Rank field works, but there are upgrade tasks that you should be aware of:
Upon upgrading to JIRA Agile 6.4:
- A sprint marker migration will be automatically triggered for all boards that have not been migrated yet. If you use Scrum and future sprints, make sure that you read Sprint Marker Migration before you upgrade.
In particular, note that the order in which your boards are migrated can affect the association between issues and sprints. This is important because you won't be able to choose the order that your boards are migrated when upgrading to JIRA Agile 6.4 — boards will be automatically migrated in this order:
Boards that are most frequently visited will be migrated first. If two or more boards have an equal number of visits, then the most recently created board will be migrated first.
If you want control over the order of migration for your boards, manually migrate your boards before you upgrade to JIRA Agile 6.4. - The current (pre-6.4) Rank custom field will be renamed to Rank (Obsolete). The Rank (Obsolete) field is redundant and can be deleted, if you choose. The old Rank field will be replaced by a new field, also named Rank.
- Saved filters that rely on the old Rank field will be automatically changed to use the new Rank field.
- If you use the Rank (Obsolete) field in a filter for a board, then ranking will be disabled for the board.
- The new Rank field uses alphanumeric values (e.g. '0|1004g') rather than numeric values like the old Rank field. The new values won't make sense when viewing them, but you can still use the Rank field to sort issues.
- If you are using the Rank API, you will need to change the custom field id used in the API call to use the new Rank field's id.
- If you are using downloadable JIRA (not OnDemand), a background reindex will be triggered. Each board will be inaccessible until 90% of the issues on it have been reindexed. We recommend that you lock JIRA and rebuild the index, if you can plan time for it.
Known Issues:
- There is currently open bug tracked at GHS-10872 - Getting issue details... STATUS and GHS-10910 - Getting issue details... STATUS which are affecting JIRA Agile 6.4.2. Please make sure you are not affected by this bug before upgrading the plugin in production instance.
MS SQL Server 2005 — Long upgrade task
If you are using MS SQL Server 2005 with the JIRA instance that JIRA Agile is installed on, the upgrade to JIRA Agile 6.4 will take much longer than normal. For example, if you have 50,000 issues in JIRA, the upgrade will take approximately 15 minutes. It may appear that the upgrade task is not doing anything during this time, even though the upgrade is still happening.
If you think that the upgrade is taking too long (given the example above) or you run into other problems, raise a support request.
Oracle 10g Server - Not supported platform for both JIRA and JIRA Agile
If you are using Oracle 10g server, it is strongly recommended to upgrade the database server to 11g first.
Compatible with JIRA 6.0.x and higher
JIRA Agile 6.4 is only compatible with JIRA 6.0.x and higher. See Supported Platforms for details.
Upgrading from GreenHopper 6.2.x or earlier to JIRA Agile 6.4
In addition to the points listed above, please read the Upgrade Notes for every version of JIRA Agile you are skipping.
Upgrade path
The recommended upgrade path for JIRA Agile is:
OLDER VERSIONS → 5.7.X → 6.3.X → 6.4 (latest version)
General notes
- GreenHopper was renamed to JIRA Agile in JIRA Agile 6.3. From JIRA Agile 6.3.0 and later, you will see 'JIRA Agile' not 'Atlassian GreenHopper' in the Universal Plugin Manager.
- Re-index and restart JIRA after the upgrade, if you are upgrading from 5.9.7 or older
- If upgrading from GreenHopper 5.8.3, you must upgrade manually — download the JIRA Agile add-on separately (from the Atlassian Marketplace) and install the add-on file by upload, as described here: Installing add-ons. Note, this applies GreenHopper 5.8.3 only.
Before upgrading from JIRA Agile 6.3.x to JIRA Agile 6.4
Read the JIRA Agile 6.4 Upgrade Notes.
- Staging your upgrade for the sprint marker migration — Ensure that you read the '(Important) Changes to the Rank field' section above. As noted in that section, upgrading to JIRA Agile 6.4 will trigger an automatic sprint marker migration for all boards.
If you use Scrum and future sprints, you may want to control the order of migration for your boards. In this case, we recommend that you upgrade to JIRA Agile 6.3 first, manually migrate your boards (by viewing each board in Plan Mode with a logged-in user, as described on Sprint Marker Migration), then upgrade from JIRA Agile 6.3 to JIRA Agile 6.4.
Before upgrading from JIRA Agile 5.7.x to JIRA Agile 5.8
Read the GreenHopper 5.8 Upgrade Notes.
- Updating your saved JIRA filters — Ensure that you read the 'Changes to Ranking' section in the GreenHopper 5.8 Upgrade Notes. As noted in that section. You need to manually update any saved JIRA filters that include the GreenHopper Rank custom field to use the new GreenHopper Global Rank field(s).