It’s incredible how much digital garbage amasses over time, even if you run an orderly organization. Here is how to clean it up.

Summertime laziness is an ideal time to get things done that you have wanted to do for a long time, but never found the time for. Each summer, I hide in the mountains and work undisturbed for days, getting much more done than on regular office days.

This summer’s focus was a digital cleanup of our JIRA tickets and Confluence pages. At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we used JIRA not just for the development team, but for the entire company.

As time has shown, this decision was only partially successful. Imagine what JIRA looks like after 7 years, with all the twists and turns our company has taken since incorporation.

How It All Started

We recently had a change in the leadership team. Our new Chief Customer Officer told me he wanted to get rid of JIRA in his team. JIRA would not help him maintain the overview, so I agreed.

We also agreed to do the JIRA cleanup together, and that we would not delete a single JIRA ticket before having taken a look at it.

This proved to be a good strategy. Out of more than 3,500 tickets, we saved 40 tickets from deletion. 39 of those tickets needed a quick chat with the customer team and could then be resolved. And the last ticket proved to be a bug reported by a customer that was somehow getting lost in the wrong JIRA project. We transferred that ticket to the bug queue so that the issue could be resolved.

When we went through the 3,500 tickets before deleting them, we noticed that there was a huge mess with epics and labels. These two elements are designed to bring order and structure to a JIRA project, but over the years, they have created more chaos than order in our JIRA projects.

One JIRA Project at a Time

After cleaning up the customer team’s JIRA project, I dared to look into the product and development team’s JIRA projects. It came as no surprise that it was a mess in those projects, too.

Even worse, the development team’s JIRA project still contained the very early tickets from the time we started developing our software. From today’s perspective, those tickets don’t describe our software anymore. Too much has changed in the requirements, and much of the code has been refactored in the meantime.

So we decided to delete all the JIRA tickets relating to the development of the initial version of our software. Also, we deleted all the JIRA tickets relating to retired features. Again, no ticket was deleted before we took a look at it.

The cleanup of the development team’s JIRA project slashed another 5,000 tickets. And it was the same mess with epics and labels that we’ve found in the customer team’s JIRA project.

Once the development team’s JIRA project was cleaned up, I attacked the last one, the product team’s JIRA project. That’s where we store all the customer feedback and feature requests for future improvement of our software. In this project, we only deleted the duplicate requests and grouped the tickets intelligently into relevant epics.

What Survived In The End

Only four JIRA projects survived the cleanup session: The product team’s JIRA project, two development JIRA projects for the Mobile and the DevOps team, and our company risk register.

On the labels side, we deleted all the labels that were somehow duplicates of epics, and just the labels for the different customers survived. In this way, we have a good overview of the open issues with each customer, and we visualize them in an orderly JIRA dashboard that fits onto a laptop screen.

Conclusion

Even if you think you’re running an orderly organization, digital garbage will amass over time. JIRA is no exception; we encountered the same mess when we migrated from Google Business to Microsoft 365 some time ago.

If we were still living in the paper world, we would have cleaned up the information mess a long time ago — our office would be so full of paper that we couldn’t even open the door.

In the digital world, garbage is invisible. That’s why you need a cleanup session now and then. Why don’t you schedule this for your next summertime laziness period?