jira projects for operations teams

[Casey Feskens]

My operations team has recently moved from redmine to JIRA/Confluence/Stash for project tracking. In redmine, we had one project for each of the 150+ services that we provide. This allowed us to easily browse the history of a particular service, bundle documentation along with the service, etc. I initially migrated our projects straight across to JIRA, and do like some things about having a separate project per service, but limits the value of some of JIRA's features, such as reporting and use of GreenHopper, both of which seem geared more towards single projects. With 100+ projects for a single team, I'm wondering if this is really the best way to do this.

How are others using JIRA for ops teams? Are there other ways that I should be thinking about project taxonomy?

[John Burns]

With the introduction of the Rapid boards, greenhopper is now much more equipped for working across projects.

As for reporting, it is true that some reports are geared for single projects, but many dashboard widgets allow you to use project category, or custom filters. I think your approach is on the right track.

On the other hand, 100+ projects is a lot to manage in my opinion. In order to decrease the administration overhead, you may want to condense projects, and use "components" to distinguish between different types of work.