We have several applications (e.g. Aa, Ab, Ac) and several products (e.g. P1, P2 etc) made up of these applications, so that P1 = Aa + Ab or P2 = Aa + Ac. I'm not sure how to organise the JIRA projects - should the project represent the product P1, P2 etc, or should the project represent the application Aa, Ab etc? There are multiple versions of each application and multiple products containing many combinations of applications.
I thought we could have a project per application (for versioning) and use components to identify the product, but this seems very confusing and unnatural - I was hoping to describe a hierarchical relationship. An alternative I thought of was to have a project for the product and use the component field to identify the application, but I want to version the apps. We could use the project category, but if a project represents an application, each project would have to have multiple categories assigned and the issues would then be associated with all the categories. No use for filtering.
I'm sure other people have faced this dilema, so I'm hoping for suggestions of what best practice might be?