When sharing a project, does its copy all plugins added to the duplicate project?

[leon.reynolds]

If I share a project template, will it duplicate the settings within the original template including all associated apps used?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @leon.reynolds 

Can you be more specific in what you mean by copying settings for associated apps?

Apps tend to be available to the entire Jira instance. If you can provide an example of one of the apps you use that allows you to specify settings per project, we can provide better advice.

[leon.reynolds]

Hi @Trudy Claspill 

For context, I look after a PMO and IT Portfolio, we have developers and product teams using Jira but are focused on Scrum/Kanban for developement management and releases.  I have been looking into whether we could move our traditional/cascading projects into Jira to be managed.

When looking at the OOTB offering, I can see that there are a few things missing from what would be default go to activities I would usually try to glean information from. This led me down the path of a number of plug-ins that could be used to provide the same coverage of data points and reporting.

The Apps:

* Activity Timeline
* Suri: Portfolio RAG Status
* MindPro Insights
* OKR Board

Ideally, I'd like to create a template project including all the necessary apps, structure and workflows. My understanding is that you cannot just duplicate, instead, it is necessary to 'share' the project/template and the settings are copied over to another project object.  It is key for me to understand if this is possible.

The next fundamental scenario for me to understand is whether I can then report on all the data points genersted within the project, e.g., the OOTB data points as well as those generated using the plug-ins.

In short, my goal is to have all teams using Jira to take benefits of continuity of tooling.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Many thanks




L

[Trudy Claspill]

In Jira Cloud there are two basic project architectures; Team Managed projects and Company Managed projects.

Company Managed projects utilize Schemes for their configurations for Workflows (how issues change statuses), Fields (the fields available for use in the issues of the project), Screens (the arrangement of fields for issues in the project), Permissions (who can do what with the issues in the project), Notifications (who gets notified when different events occur for issues), and Issue Types (what types of issues can be created in the project).

When a Company Managed project is created, and note that only a Jira Administrator can create those, the project can be created using copies of the default schemes associated with the project template selected, or they can share the schemes that are already used by another project. When sharing is selected, the two projects truly share the configuration schemes,; changes to the schemes affect all projects that share them.

In addition to those two options at creation, after creation a Jira Administrator can customize the schemes used by a project, modifying the definition of the scheme itself or associating a different scheme to the project. This can be done separately for each scheme; i.e. they could choose to change or swap out just the Notification scheme and leave the others unaffected.

Team Managed projects, in contrast, are intended to be stand alone projects. The customizations can be managed by a Project Administrator for the individual project, and configurations/customizations in one project don't impact other projects. Additionally the configurations are not organized into shareable Schemes.

Regarding reporting, answering that question depends very much on the specific data you want to gather in your report and how you want to present it. Jira includes some predefined reports, and it includes some gadgets for reporting. The predefined reports have limitations on their configuration options. The gadgets often can be based on "filters" (queries you design to retrieve the issues you want to include in your reporting), but may also have limitations on the available aggregation options or presentation options. Jira has a built in issue searching capability that uses a query language, but the query language doesn't enable you to search on every single data element you may see presented in issues. And that searching capability is designed to retrieve issue, not projects, or people, or other entities. The output is a list of issues.

Filters can be saved and shared with others. However they are not part of a project's configuration. They would not specifically be shared or copied based on creation of a project. 

Jira does not have a generic reporting engine that lets you build whatever type of report you want. There are various third party apps that provide that type of functionality.

With third party apps that add more functionality to Jira, they may or may not also add to the query language to allow you to search for issues based on the data points they add. They may or may not add more reporting capabilities specialized to the data they add.

I advise you to consider devoting time to working with Jira and the apps you've identified to do a proof of concept to ensure you can get what you want. Most apps have a free trial period (usually 30 days). You could work with the administrators of your Jira system to see if they would add the apps to your existing environment for trial. Alternately you could set up your own free copy of Jira and add the apps for trial there. The functionality of a Free copy of Jira is slightly different than a paid copy, in that some customization options and features are not available in the free copy.

You may also benefit from taking the classes available through Atlassian University to learn more about project administration and configuration, and other features of Jira like Permissions management. The university won't have classes specific to third party apps, but you may find more specific information in the app documentation or in YouTube videos.