How Windshift's Jira migration assistant works
Connect Jira Cloud or Data Center, select a representative project, review the mapping, and inspect the result before expanding the migration.
A Jira instance contains far more than its issues. Comments, attachments, worklogs, boards, sprints, custom fields, workflows, users, and years of configuration all affect how a team works.
Windshift's migration assistant begins with a pilot. You can test a real project, inspect the proposed mappings, and review the imported result before deciding how to handle the rest of the instance.
Start with a project your team knows
Choose a project that contains the Jira features your team depends on. A small empty project hides the details that determine whether a migration will work: custom fields, several workflow statuses, boards and sprints, attachments, or Jira Service Management data.
The assistant connects to Jira without changing the source. It discovers the projects available to the account and shows their issue counts. You can select one project or a group of projects for analysis.
Connect Jira Cloud or Data Center
Open **Admin > Imports > Jira** in Windshift and create a connection.
For Jira Cloud, enter the site URL, the email address for the Atlassian account, and a Jira API token. For Jira Data Center, enter the instance URL and a personal access token. The account needs permission to browse the projects and view the issues that you want to import.
Choose the import scope
Once the connection succeeds, the assistant lists the projects the account can access. Search the list, select individual projects, or select all of them. You can also import only open issues when historical closed work is outside the first test.
The assistant analyzes the selected scope before it creates data. Depending on the project and the connection's permissions, the analysis can include:
Review the mappings
Jira and Windshift share several concepts, but their models differ in some areas. The assistant shows the mappings for issue types, statuses, versions, and custom fields before the import begins.
Supported custom fields can be created in Windshift and populated with their imported values. Fields that need different treatment appear separately. The assistant can preserve some values as raw data or keep them as text instead of dropping them.
Preview the result
The preview reports the selected projects and the data Windshift found. Depending on the source, that includes work items, statuses, item types, custom fields, users, versions, Assets, and customer organizations.
It also shows how the assistant plans to represent that data in Windshift. Use those details to confirm the scope before importing. Jira may still look different after the move because some source behavior and application data need separate handling.
Some behavior needs follow-up
Behavior built around a Jira instance needs separate review during migration. Marketplace apps, ScriptRunner code, automations, webhooks, permission schemes, workflow conditions, validators, post-functions, and transition screens may need replacement or retirement decisions.
Some Jira concepts have no direct equivalent in Windshift. The assistant reports those boundaries so the migration plan can account for them. A representative project exposes these dependencies much earlier than a clean demo project.
Use the pilot to make a decision
A useful pilot follows this path:
1. Pick one representative project.