Project Settings

[Lukas Rybnicky]

Hey everyone!

For quick introduction I'm member of QA team. I've been using Jira software for about 1,5 year now. I'm still learning/improving my work with Jira, and one of my responsibilities is to maintenance Jira and Confluence. But there is a problem, i never worked with Jira before, and it is hard to work as a QA and also Jira administrator, to learn things fast enough... I recently bought book from Rachel Wright - Jira Strategy Admin Workbook for better understanding of Jira. The biggest problem I'm facing right know is to setup some standards in our Jira Cloud, and step by step to improve our work. 

I'm searching some kind of right project settings to setup some standard for our Jira Cloud. I know that every company has it's own approach to managing/creating projects and have their own "know-how". That's why i created this topic to get some kind of feedback from community and their experience with Jira, and solve some questions which i got and maybe some people from this community too. I'll show you 3 different basic project settings which we got, and i hope i'll somehow manage to find best way to improve them. 

Project Setup 1
Project: 123 <- Actual Game Name
1 Game inside project.

Epics
123-1 (Project Management)
123-2 (Quality Assurance)
123-3 (Server Development)
123-4 (Game Client Development)
...
Stories/Bugs/Tasks
ABC-5(Task) - Graphic Template
ABC-6(Bug) - Game crashed after i joined to party

• We've already around 80 projects only with 1 Game inside a project...
• Don't feel right to be honest.

Project Setup 2
Project: ABC <- Game Name
3 Games inside one project.

Epics
ABC-1 (Project Management)
ABC-2 (Quality Assurance)
ABC-3 (Server Development)
ABC-4 (Game Client Development)
...
Stories/Bugs/Tasks
ABC-5(Task) - Graphic Template
ABC-6(Bug) - Game crashed after i joined to party
Components - at the moment, we are using components as different Games
ABC 100 - Game 1
ABC 200 - Game 2
ABC 1000 - Game 3

• We were currently working on game ABC 1000, stories, bugs, tasks and issues got Components ABC 1000.
• Now we need to work on the ABC 100 and ABC 200. 
• One of the issue i'm facing is that, we currently have work logs inside of epics, but these work logs are supposed to be only for ABC 1000.
• Is there to some way to manage those epics, or just convert them to new issue type and create epics as ABC 100, ABC 200, ABC 1000 ?

Project Setup 3
Project: Games <- few games inside one project
Epics
GM-1 (Game A)
GM-2 (Game B)
GM-3 (Game C)
...
Stories 
GM-4 (Project Management)
GM-5 (Quality Assurance)
GM-6 (Server Development)
GM-7 (Game Client Development)
...
Components aren't used

• For me this setup seems the best.
• But we are not using Components/Labels or some kind of issue Category for filtering issues... and the biggest problem is that most of "Epics" were using Sub-tasks instead of stories/tasks/bugs...
• With last projects stories/tasks/bugs... were mostly used instead of Sub-tasks (there was improvement from my perspective)

Questions:

1. Which of one of these project settings feels correct, if any ?
2. Qa, Project management, etc... is this correct to use them as Epics, stories? 
   
   • Shouldn't they be used as Components/Category or Team(custom field is locked in Jira Cloud)?
3. With Project Setup 1 should i bulk them together inside one project?
4. Any experience how to enforce people/company to start using sprints/scrum as it should be used?
   • With all deadlines, requirements, meetings etc, it looks like scrum is the best way for us. 

• Ps: Many people in our company don't use Jira as they should be.
• Ps1: We are not using sprints and scrum as it should be used. 
• Ps2: I know i wrote this topic "generally" and not specifically, but for some basic template of project hope it'll be enough...
• Ps3: Any experience, feedback, practices, improvements will be useful!
  
  

Thanks in advance.
Kind regards,

Lukas