How do you handle shared components in your JIRA projects?

Question

Atlassian does not publish a best practise guide for this question (I asked for it, but it was rejected). I wonder how other admins handle the situation that software products share some components.

How do you organize your projects? Do you create one and the same component several times? Or do you keep them all in one JIRA project?

At the moment, I think the best way is to create shared components several times, per project, but I don't know if I have overlooked some trapdoors. I'm aware that

* it is much administration overhead if you are not allowed to buy plugins
* when querying JIRA for components, you need to include all projects
* charts with component filter will not sum-up the issues but list the component n times which makes the charts unconvenient to read.

Thanks for your attention

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You could just drop the need for components completely.  The places I've been that use global components re-use the field for something local to the project instead, but some don't need that and just drop it.

Evelin · Answer

Thanks for the hint about the re-index, and I will also think about your other suggestions.

Regarding the usability: User will need to fill in two fields, component and global component. So far I didn't ask them but I guess they are not too pleased.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The standard component reports will continue to report on project components, but as you're not using them for the cross-project stuff, that's fine.  You're going to need to create cross-project reporting reports (saved filters and dashboards are your friends for this)

You do no need to re-index a custom field unless you're making certain structural changes to where it's used.  This field should be set to be globally available - all projects and issue types, so you'll need to index once to make it fully searchable (with or without any data in it) and that's it, you don't need to index anything again.

You won't have the component lead functionality on a simple global component field, no, but then it wouldn't work globally anyway - a lead might not even be assignable in projects.

I don't understand your last paragraph at all.  Adding a new field will give you cross-project visibility of a genuinely shared component that can be reported on like any other field.  It will affect usability - it'll make it easier to work with global components!