When to create a new project in Jira?

schapsl

Hi all.

We develop and maintain a software and use Jira for task and project managment.

We develop major releases and have ongoing maintenance (bug-fixing, patches, small CRs). There are separate teams for maintenance and development. Major releases are considered a project in terms of a defined start, end, budget and scope/features and therefore have their own project managment of time and budget. In contrast, maintenance is ongoing, has no start, no end and no fixed scope.

The scope of a major release can vary dramatically and so can the development team. There might be even no development team at all and no dedicated budget sometimes and the maintenance team can handle small scopes of major releases.

Now my question:

In the past we created a new Jira project for every major-release project and we have a dedicated Jira project for maintenance.

I have the feeling that keeping it all together in one Jira project would have advantages.

What pros and cons do you see? What would be the recommended best practice?

Alex Koxaras -Relational-

Hi @schapsl 

I would be in favor of "one project to rule them all", if and only if all project share common ground. E.g. if you are developing websites, then I see no reason of having each website to its own project. If you develop e.g. mobile apps, and you develop them cross platform, and again share most of the settings (components, platform, workflows etc), then again I would use only one project. Of course I would try to keep my kanban as clean as possible, releasing the versions when possible, and chasing all the devs to log time and transition their issues properly.

The above setup would be very handy for the devs, since they would know that their work is only in one place.

If you have separate projects, you have to make sure that they use the same settings. This would reduce your maintenance. This may not be possible for projects that require special attention, have their own workflows etc. For very large projects (year+) most likely I would go with different projects and a dashboard to monitor their progress.

Hope that any of the above helps you!
Alex