Service desk and software with single developer

[Casey M]

Hi all. I am new to Jira but enjoying it. I am trying to create a solid, scalable workflow for  my use case, which is as follows:

My agency specializes in maintaining web applications. 

A single developer is tasked with maintaining three web applications. All time is tracked via a Harvest integration.

I prefer to use Jira software's next-gen projects for simplicity.

Since we are performing web maintenance, about 50% of the issues will be internal and involve security updates, backups, performance improvements, etc. The other 50% will be client requests to add new features, report bugs, etc. 

If I understand the integration between Jira Service Desk and Jira Software properly, in order to have separate service desks for each project, I need to create two projects for every web application:

- My Example Project (software)

- My Example Project (service desk)

How would you handle this use case? Would you:

A. Tightly integrate service desk and software for every web app

Maybe I can create rules to automatically create a corresponding ticket in the software version of the project? Can I close those tickets from software?

B. Use service desk only

This would simplify things greatly, but I would lose out on the ability to track my internal issues with kanban boards, backlog, etc. I would need to create a new priority scheme and queue that allows for backlog items, since many of the issues are 'ideas' or things that need to be done later.

Which would you choose? Is there another option I'm not considering?

Thanks,
Casey

[Casey M]

One more options I thought of is:

C. Run a single help desk project, and associate issues based on the client

The issue I can see with this is developers working in the help desk would see issues for ALL of the projects beyond the three that they manage.