I've been using JIRA for few months -we are following traditional development methods (no agile/scrum). One of the things that I cannot decide, is when should we create separate projects in JIRA, and when should we add issues to the current projects and not creating new projects.
The nature of the projects we work on is something like the following:
- Mobile App development (3 months project)
- Gamification App (3 months project)
- Extend mobile App features (few months later after going live – one month)
- Adding functionalities to the current CRM platform (some of them 2 days, other 2 weeks developments)
- Another Gamification App for the same client (3 months)
- Support for all live projects and bugs fixing (on going).
Currently, each client has only one project in JIRA, and all, let's say the client gamification Apps, and mobile Apps, are added under this project. So tasks are shuffled between the many different products under one project. In addition, there is support tasks, and another product extension to add more functionalities which might take weeks to develop. It is hard to see each product separately as standalone project. It is even hard to see each development cycle for the same product separately (I'm here referring to adding extra functions to the same project after it goes live, it is more like new business with new budget). Hence, it is hard to find all related tasks to this App and provide how much time spent on it.
Another issue is, all these on going support tasks, are added to each project per client. Say we have 4 clients, each support task is added to the related client project. However, these bugs belong to sometimes totally different platforms, Apps … etc.
My question, should we create a separate JIRA project for each of the above projects?
How about bugs fixing and support. Should we add them to their product projects (i.e., bug in mobile App, is added as a task to the mobile App project)
Although I feel this should be the way, there is a concern within the team (since we have numerous small projects), that the number of JIRA projects will grow rapidly, such that we will not be able to find the projects easily in the list (so we do not want to run from tasks confusion, to projects confusion). That is, it is important to us as well to categorize our work per client.
So in a nutshell, should JIRA projects be created per client or per product?
If per product, is there a way to display reports on aggregated projects per client?
Best Answer
Go back to the basics and pretend you don't have JIRA. How would you organize the projects?
What I would do is create a portfolio folder for each client and then their projects would be within that folder.
Maybe your company really does have a lot of small projects, you shouldn't be nervous about modeling JIRA based on the reality of the situation.
You can use filters in JIRA to create a board that will show tasks/stories/tickets across projects.
For example, we have a team that works on 3 different projects. All of those project tasks appear on 1 board.