What are the recommendated roles for a development team?

[Amy Hogan]

I have been using JIRA for a few months in a pilot but now some of our product development teams want to try to use it. I have been using the default roles but I think this will need to be expanded. In reading, it's unclear what the recommendations are. This team has your standard functional roles- analyst, developers, project managers, testers, customers (external), off-shore developers, etc.  Should I be creating roles for each of these? I have seen others say there should be a role for employee vs. customer.  Is that correct?    How do I rapidly copy the permissions because when I went to set up one new role, it looked like I had to click on every permission individually to add it to the role, which feels tiresome.  Also, there are two primary divisions in our company and they are used to NOT having access to each others projects. In general, in our current model, people only have access to projects that they are working on.  How do I structure this in Jira?  Thanks in advance for any advice...

[Ramiro Pointis]

Hi Amy,

I had experience with few roles and with a lot of roles too. In my experience, too much roles could be a pain to maintain.

As right now I'm using the default roles with an addition of 'Tester' role. If I ever need to add another it probably will be a 'Project Manager' role, altought exists the Project Leader figure it doesn't meet my needs because it can't be used like a role per se.

In terms of structure I always prefered using only roles in the permission scheme. That way you can easily know who can see a project (roles tab in project administration) ad depending on what role a user have in a project you know what can and can't do.

Hope this helps!