Moving from Redmine to Jira - what about Subprojects?

[Steffen Dittrich]

Our software company (~ 250 employees) is thinking about moving vom Redmine to Jira.

However, we currently use a stucture based on subprojects in Redmine. I'm trying to figure out how we should organize ourselfes in Jira, since Jira doesn't seem to have the concept of subprojects.

I'll try to explain how we are organized right now in Redmine and hopefully anyone can give me some advice on how to do this in Jira.

We have 2 differenet lines of business:

a) Product Development

b) Project Management

Product Development is developing product suite - you might compare it to MS Office.

There is a redmine project "Product Suite", which has all the target versions, which are our releases. All product developers are members of this redmine project. For every product (like Word, Excel, ...) there is a subproject. Some products have optional AddOns, which are again subprojects of the product.

Components are used for technical parts of each product (like database, frontend, ...).

Alltogether we have about 50 projects in redmine for product development - all of which are subprojects of the top level project "Product Suite".

Project Manamgent on the other hand is doing customer services and sometimes they develop customizings.

Beside the top level redmine project for product development there is a top level project for each customer. And we user subprojects for different projects we do for each customer. Often these subproject correspond to a order in our erp-system.

Since you can define relations between issues from different redmine projects the project management people can link there issues to issues in product development.

We have about 200 projects in redmine for customers. Each of them has from 1 to 20 subprojects.

As you can see - we largely rely on project stuctures with subprojects in Redmine.

How can we organize this in Jira?

[Prashant Mali]

Hi @Steffen Dittrich ,

This Atlassian documentaion helps you to do migartion. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/multiple-redmine-projects-with-the-same-name-will-lead-to-error-when-importing-to-jira-320111789.html

[Steffen Dittrich]

Thank you, but this article doesn't really help me.

My problem isn't to migrate the data. Let's just assume I don't want to migrate any issues and start over.

My problem is to define a proper project structure in Jira, as I described above.

[Prashant Mali]

Hi @Steffen Dittrich ,

Oh. I understand your requirement little bit. 

In JIRA, We can categorize project using Project Category like wise you can create two different project category. you can also create one custom field to maintain different business name at the time of creation of new issue in project. 

a) Product Development

b) Project Management

Here, You have to create Main Project for all redmine sub project. there is no any alternative in JIRA. You can use component as it is in jira side

Issue linking is possible easily in jira from any project.

Thanks,

Prashant

[Steffen Dittrich]

Let's concentrate on product development for now:

If I create different projects for each of the 50 products of the suite, I need to define the releases (target versions) 50 times. Not very satisfying. And I need to manage team members 50 times and not only once. All a major step back from redmine.

If I create one large project for all 50 products, I could use components to separate the different products. But we need components for technical sorting (database, gui, e.g.). Also I would imagine a big mess, having so many issues for 50 products in one project a team of 40 developers working all on the same project.

[Steffen Dittrich]

My impression is that Jira seems to be very good in organising things within a project. It doesn't really have features to organise a lot of projects.

Maybe there's an add-on for that?