What's the easiest way to manage large numbers of small teams?

[Will Masek]

Hi folks,

We use JIRA/Confluence for our students here at the University on group projects, in order to give them a taste of what it's like working with real software companies.

My issue is, we have a small number of staff managing Jira/Confluence and setting up 50-100 projects for different modules and different student groups is not only time consuming but very hard to manage. I've tried to keep our project naming conventions consistent but the search functions seems a bit lacklustre (often bringing back zero results because of an extra space or some minor difference).

I was hoping a power user here might be able to suggest a better way than giving each student group their own JIRA project/Conf. space?

I read a few other questions that suggest potentially having a single project (per module subject) with multiple Epics might be a better way to go? I'm assuming though Permissions/Roles are done on a per project basis so there would be nothing stopping students in one group deleting the work of students in another group?

Having said that I would guess that JIRA/Confluences backs everything up so if there ever was any foul-play I could roll back to a previous backup.

Any suggestions welcome, that basics of it are:

- Students take multiple modules (subjects)
- Each module has a group assignment that students need a JIRA project + Confluence page for.
- Ideally I want students to *only* be able to access/edit their own group issues/page, not those of other groups.
- Most importantly... I just need to cut the workload, administrating this many projects is taking up far too much of my time.

Many thanks,

Will M.
University of Gloucestershire