What exactly is the purpose of Project Categories???

[Tudor Hofnar]

I created some Project Categories but can't find a way where they aree of actual use in JIRA, or how they help with anything...

Any examples of these categories are used?

Our structure consists of projects for Development, Services and Support (for now). And under each of those projects we have components which are our Products.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

They're for grouping projects together, by however you want to group them (business unit, product, something)

It's not particularly powerful though - you can't hang permissions or schemes off them, they don't flow down on to issues, or get used in greenhopper etc. You can ask, using JQL, "all issues in category X", but that's about it really.

Because they're not a lot of practical use for config, they're not that heavily used anywhere I've been.

[Tudor Hofnar]

That's what I was thinking as well. I haven't seen any categories trace down to issues or anywhere else. Basically they can be used in JQL but not for much that matters to us.

[rafaferreira]

I'm using just to group projects. it's not powerful !

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's what I said.

[jose_castro]

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-4505 Assign schemes at the Project category level

Vote for this I did! It's already being looked at actively by the development team. Please make sure to state your own use cases (provide a real word example). 

[Damien]

We use project categories to group projects that share similar purposes, and therefore share issuetype, screen, workflow, etc. schemes.

Very convenient for JIRA admin role. Cheers.

[Bryan Partridge]

It helps with Filters.  Great way to 'group' projects so that a filter will (easily) apply to multiple projects:  For example, all unassigned issues across multiple projects that belong to the same category.

Instead of:  (project = Proj-A OR project = Proj-B OR project = Proj-E OR ...) AND status = unassigned

This would become:  category = Operations AND status = unassigned

Where:  Operations (category) => (Proj-A + Prod-B + Projects-E + ...)

[Hakeem]

Hi Bryan,

I have a similar situation here.

Scenario:

Project A = Scrum board | Kanban board. All Scrum boards represent the development work whilst kanban boards represent operational work.

Project B = Same as A 

My question is - I want to show on my dashboard information for both boards separately. 

Thank you.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You might struggle with this - boards do not have to match projects, and hence you may have several issues from different categories.

You will need to look at each board you want to report on, and use its filter in a dashboard gadget (unless you can pull up some commonality that makes a filter easier)

[Hakeem]

You have just validated my thoughts. I wanted to know if there is a better way of doing this. 

Thank you so very much.

[Peter Fitzpatrick]

I use "Project Category" to differentiate our programmes, This then feeds into my Power BI report which can filter our projects by programmes. Thus providing my organisation with an easy way to get granular data (how many issues open/closed per programme/project, etc.) in an easy format with live data. 

[B. TORRES]

You may also use it to Group your projects by Company for which that project belongs to.

For example:

Company 1

• Project 1
• Project 2

Company 2

• Project 1
• Project 2
• Project 3

[Darrel Lee]

In our organization we Categories to group projects by Business Unit.