Project Creation Best Practices

Question

As a startup product based company, we have only an application, a platform and a website. All the 3 are already fully develop and in use by our customers, and now we just add a new feature to it or make some changes and modify the behaviors. So creating 3 project for each or creating different project based on functionality or based on releases(we do frequent releases). What do you think which option is better?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

You may want to take a look at the differences between Team Managed (Next Gen) and Company Managed (Classic) projects. There are several articles published by Atlassian, and several posts in this community that discuss the difference. The primary difference I note is that Team Managed projects are for teams that need to manage their workflow and data independently of how data is managed in any other project. Project Admins can customize the workflow and customize fields, and all those customization are absolutely unique to the individual Team Managed project. None of those customizations are "shared" with other projects. Other projects can have custom fields with the same names and workflows set up the same way, but the custom fields are workflows are seen as separate elements unique to each project. Company Managed projects can share workflows, custom fields, screens, permission schemes, and so on. Those customization have to be managed by a JIRA Administrator. If you need to be able to produce reports across all the projects and have the data mean the same thing in all projects, and if you want all the issues managed in a consistent manner across the projects, then Company Managed is the way to go.

If you need to produce those reports across all the projects and ensure the information can be gathered in a consistent manner for all project and summed up for all projects, I would use Company Managed projects for all three.

I work primarily with Company Managed projects. I only work with Team Managed projects to set up experiments to investigate questions that get posted in this community. So I can't really say what it would take to produce the reports for Team Managed projects.

I have not needed to produce any of the above reports, so I don't have information readily available on how they would each be produced.

I would encourage you to post question about producing these reports in the Questions section of this community (vs. the Discussion section where this post is). In your post make sure to include that you are trying to produce the reports for both Company Managed and Team Managed projects. Also specify if you need to roll up the data for these separate projects into one report, or if each report will be details for just one project at a time. You may also want to ask about each report in a separate post, as covering information for production of 5 different reports could result in a really long and confusing thread with answers about each report getting intermingled.

deepak_2a89lg · Answer

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

All three(Website, Application, and Platform) are integrated. And I have created separate projects, but I created one product as a Next-Gen project and the other as a Classic project. And I'm confused with the features of both projects.

The reason for making a separate project is that I'm using zephyr with the Jira test management suite and maintaining the test cases in one single project is very difficult.

Now I have to provide the below matrices to my manager:

1. Defect Numbers per Feature
2. Escaping Defects from Dev to QA, QA to Staging, Staging to Production
3. Dashboard of Aging Defects
4. The average time is taken for Defect Resolution
5. Reopen Rate

So getting this data and share it with my manager, is the major problem.

Can you give me an idea of how to achieve this, and is it achievable in Next-Gen or Classic type?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Generally, I consider it a best practice to have a JIRA project per product, but there are some factors to consider.

Is there code/functionality that is shared between any of the three products (application, platform, and website)?

Do you developers work on issues for only one of those, or do they work across all of them?

Are you planning to use the Agile features of JIRA (Scrum or Kanban)?

Do you have any reason to limit any person's access to view the issues or create/edit issues for any of the products?

Does the work on the different products follow different workflow process?

What sort of reporting are you going to need to do for each product and across all products?

If you have no reason to set people's permissions differently based on the product, and if your developers work on all the products, you may want to have a single Project in JIRA and use one of the available fields (like Labels or Components) or a custom field to "tag" the issues identifying to which product they apply. Having one project will reduce your administrative overhead.

It can be easier to do reports on individual products if they are each tracked in their own project. Their release tracking is then also segregated based on the project. Each product can have their own set of Components to use for identifying the issues applying to different functional areas of the individual products. If there isn't a different workflow per product, this is easier to manage if the products are in separate projects.