Add support for JIRA Service Desk (stage 1)

We are releasing version 2.3.0-J7 of Adaptavist Project Configurator, that includes support for Jira Service Desk configurations.

Coverage

This version is able to export and import these configuration items in a Service Desk:

• Request types (including fields and status mappings)
• Request type groups
• Queues
• SLAs (including calendars, goals and conditions)

The rest of the configuration in a Service Desk project will be covered in other versions to be released during next weeks.

This version is also able to move a complete Service Desk project with its issue data to another instance.

How to use

There is no specific action required from the user in order to export or import Service Desk configurations. If one of the exported projects has a service desk, it will be exported automatically. If the configuration being imported contains service desks these will be imported.

Needless to say, JIRA Service Desk must be enabled and licensed at the time of export and import, else service desk configurations will be ignored. As with JIRA Software, it is important that both installations of Service Desk, source and target, have the same language, including the country. Otherwise custom fields created by JIRA Service Desk will have different names and the import will not be able to match them.

Users have the option to skip import of "Service Desks", as any other object category. However, this should be used with care. If a project of type "servicedesk" is created and it does not have a minimum Service Desk configuration, JIRA will refuse to display that project correctly. In practical terms, we think skipping import of "Service Desks" will only be useful for existing projects that already have a Service Desk configured which the user does not want to change (but at the same time, he wishes to apply changes to other parts of the project configuration).

Service desks are handled as part of the configuration of projects, so they will be exported/imported both when moving only the configuration or complete projects.

Limitations and known issues

• Currently, there is not an equivalent functionality in the version of Project Configurator for Jira 6. Backporting service desk handling to Jira 6 depends on Jira Service Desk APIs for those versions being similar enough to those in JIRA 7. This is a work in progress and there should be a clear answer within the next weeks.
• The order of request type groups within the service desk is not guaranteed to be preserved.
• When migrating service desk data, the JIRA administrator must "update" SLAs at the target instance after the import. The same applies if a configuration import updates the SLAs of an existing service desk. This will ensure SLA custom field values are rebuilt. Future versions of Project Configurator may automate this task.
• When the import creates a new service desk, as the current version does not support all service desk configuration objects, it is possible JIRA issues a message saying that the service desk is not configured completely (for example, because it lacks any notification rule). When showing that message, JIRA will offer the option to add some default notification rules. The user can call this or create a set of customized notification rules manually.