How to setup single Team, multi areas multi projects

[Alexander Winkler]

Hi,

I have as small single software team that works on multiple projects which are of various areas. We therefore currently use the following setup in Jira Software:

We created 3 distinct Jira Software projects for our relevant areas:

- Hardware

- Cloud

- Apps

As various people in our department work on projects within such area it made sense to us to group all tasks, code repos, deployments into this areas. Within an area we use components to group the area into the specific project. For example: The App Project may have a iOS component and an Android component.

So far so good. A few things that currently bother us are for example: The deployments screen within projects is wonderful, but it is missing filter for components. So now we have Android, iOS etc in our App project but are unable to filter out the deployments so all tasks are now mixed up and you loose the benefits of this view which would have shown us the process and current state of live versions in context with task for a specific component.

Another bugger is the advanced roadmap, as it doesn't allow using more than a single release from a project in combined releases. As our app project contains for example iOS and Android, we often have two Releases at the same time within our App project. Advanced roadmaps doesn't allow us to create a combined release that has a Release for our "Hardware" project in combination with the platform specific "Android" and "iOS" release.

So it somehow feels like projects were not ment to be used for more than a single real world project and that it would be a better idea to create a Jira Project for "iOS" and another one for "Android". But then we would end up with hundreds of projects small a large. And some of them require duplicate tasks, that must be done on multiple projects (for example adding a button would need a task in iOS and a copy of this task for Android). Having everything a different task may lead to a a lot of extra work.

How do you solve this? Should we create a single project for each real world project so that everything is separated from code to deplyoments? Then plan everything in advanced roadmaps? Or is there another way to overcome the problems/feature limits from above? 

At the moment we are unsure if we should keep this simple setup or split it up and create multiple projects but this would be the perfect time as we are just getting started so changing the structure is currently still easy to do as along as we are in our setup phase.

btw: For Cloud topics it may even be more complicated, as there are hundreds of micro services but all of them usually as part of a specific use case. In case we should decide to go with the "Create Jira projects for each real world project" approach, for cloud topics we would consider creating a project by use case and grouping all micro services that belong to this together, to prevent ending up with too many projects at once in Jira software.