Best practice of using components in jira projects [closed]

Question

We are using Jira heavily in our day to day development. I'd like to see if there are any best practices in creating project components in Jira?

For example, in your opinion, is it better to create a component for each development module in Jira or maybe finer-grained components are preferred by your team?

Answer 1

Components are like little sub-projects. Projects seem to be most useful when they group people together. I recommend to my clients that JIRA projects reflect the social organization to some degree, at least until the number of projects becomes very large.

Also, avoid the use of a component named "Misc" or "Other". They tend to become waste dumps of issues that no-one cares about.

Answer 2

Most important about components is to be unambiguous and not too many. In our team now, we are migrating to 3 level hierarchy (in GreenHopper sense):

• on the top level you have the BA components which are few and delineated by team (infra, backend, GUI) - this helps BA guys route the request to the correct DEV-team manager assigned as component lead.
• the second level is actual process (in the Unix sense). This is very clear definition. In case an issue maps to multiple processes, we assign it to one of them (BTW, GreenHopper does not allow multiple leaf components, but plain JIRA does). This is done by DEV manager.
• the third level is optional and rarely used, denoting subsystem within the process. We use it when a considerable part of the of the issues are related to a well defined part of the code and we want to track them separately. This is usually done by the developer working on the issue.

In order for such progressive refinement to work, you need to have idea of who is assigning to which component and who is processing the issues assigned to it. The latter is denoted by Component Lead, the former is not explicitly supported by JIRA (or we would be able to say that BA's see only their components, DEV managers, only their subcomponents + all BA, etc.)