(this overview is not 100% final and might evolve as we receive more comments)

To read more about the motivation to migrate away from JIRA and what we aim to improve for users, see: https://lab.civicrm.org/infrastructure/ops/wikis/gitlab-roadmap

tl;dr, the Core Team is planning to move off JIRA:

• We will keep pull-requests on Github
• We will not require to open an issue for a pull-request
  • Will require enforcing the PR template more strictly
  • Having clear commit messages
  • Nonetheless strongly encourage to create an issue early on, before a dev invests significant energy in a pull-request that might be rejected, and to encourage collaboration / early feedback.
• Under the "Development Team" space in Gitlab, there will be multiple projects, ex: civicase, event, contribution, accounting, cloud-native, translation, etc (hopefully not more than a dozen, but we'll see).
  • These issues can then be referenced in commit messages.
  • Gitlab will fill a gap between Mattermost and Stack Exchange, where we might want to discuss improvements (or bugs without a PR), get feedback and encourage collaboration, create roadmaps, etc.
  • Separating project spaces will help with LeXiM, whose discussion already happens in other repositories.
  • It should also help to see who helps maintain various components, to be able to ping people to get feedback/review on PRs.
  • We can search across the projects under a group (dev-team) using labels, for example, to find open critical/blocker issues.
• JIRA archives will be migrated to an archived project in Gitlab (so that we can eventually turn off the JIRA server, while keeping a searchable archive).
  • Around February 2018, it will no longer be possible to create a new issue in JIRA, but it will still be possible to comment or otherwise followup on existing issues.
  • The archives would be migrated to Gitlab towards June.
  • Add redirects from https://issues.civicrm.org/CRM-XXXX to the new URL in Gitlab

Tasks / Roadmap:

• March/April 2017: Test Gitlab usability for general projects, such as CiviCamps and civicrm.org
• June 2017: Officially adopt Gitlab and announce moving away from Confluence
• July 2017 to January 2018: Get community feedback on JIRA to Gitlab migration plan
• January 2018: Ensure that Release Notes do not rely on JIRA (the script is parsing the git log? discussed with AGH)
• January 2018: Automatically assign the correct milestone (fix-version).
• February 2018: Implement policy that opening a JIRA issue is no longer required to submit a pull-request
  • Propose updates to the developer docs.
  • Ensure that Release Notes tools have what they need to work as expected (ex: github release milestones)
• ~ April 2018: remove permission to create new issues in JIRA (initial target was February 2018).
• ~ March 2018: Move Extensions (EXT) to Gitlab
• ~ March 2018: Move CiviVolunteer to either Gitlab or Github
• ~ June 2018: Migrate the JIRA archives to an archive project in Gitlab (which means that the 1798 open issues would have to be re-triaged / moved?)
• Create a static HTML version of JIRA in case any information is missing from the migration to Gitlab.
• Configure a redirection from issues.c.o/CRM-1234 to lab.c.o/dev/archive/1234
  • We are not migrating the full history, so this isn't necessary. For issues that are migrated, we can post a comment with the new URL?

More context:

• https://lab.civicrm.org/infrastructure/ops/wikis/jira-to-gitlab-migration
• https://lab.civicrm.org/infrastructure/ops/wikis/gitlab-roadmap