Is creating groups the only way to mimic teams in JIRA?

[Lucy Dilts]

I have 25 Engineering teams that need to be able to create and work on tickets in JIRA. These teams work on both project and non-project work at the same time. I have created a number (5) of projects in JIRA, however, it seems odd to now have to still create 25 other projects in JIRA, when they really aren't project rather they are teams. I know that they need some "bucket" in which to attached their tickets / work to, however, I can see it get really confusing to differentiate as to what is a team and what is a project. Especially when it is never the case that a whole team work on a project.

Looking at the Angry Nerd example from previous post other people have made, should I just create groups instead? Can I still report on the velocity of a group? How would like work? A hard requirement is understanding team capacity and board assignment consolidation

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Andy Heinzer]

Groups are the preferred way to organize user accounts in Jira for a number of purposes.  They particularly play a major part of settings up notification schemes, permission schemes, application access, project roles, filter subscriptions, and probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head.   All of these can be setup to use single individual users, but we almost never recommend that because it tends to take way longer to setup and then continue to manage later on.

Whereas if you setup a project role to use a group, it's much easier to just manage the membership of that group as users both join your team or leave your organization for example.  

I am a big fan of the Sample best practice image included on the KB: JIRA Permissions made Simple as a means to help explain the way Atlassian recommends this be setup.

The native Agile reporting included in Jira Software does provide a velocity report, but this does not explicitly show you users or groups.  Instead it just attempts to inform you as to how quickly your team working on that project is getting through issues.

If you are interested in better understanding team capacity, then you are probably more interested in additional plugins to Jira such as Portfolio for Jira (an Atlassian plugin) or perhaps something like Tempo Planner (by the vendor Tempo)

I hope this helps,
Andy