we’re going to configure JIRA for use by an imaginary accounting department. The people in Accounting may have decided to store invoices in JIRA rather than using some other dedicated and perhaps much more expensive system.

The information stored for Accounting is totally different from what appears in a Bug issue type, and includes a custom field named Amount. Only certain people can see the accounting information in JIRA, and some of this information is still further restricted. The accounting department also requested that they should see nothing about Engineering projects, since that was just unnecessary clutter on their screens.

The first thing to do is to take a backup of your JIRA data, do this work on a development JIRA instance, or both. The next things to do are:

Create a new Project Category for the accounting department, e.g., Accounts. Some scheme names will use this word as a prefix, so make sure that the category name is something obviously unique, meaningful and brief.

Create a new issue type for that department’s issues, for example, Invoice. This is because we know we will have a different set of fields for accounts issues, and possibly a different workflow. Add a description of what kind of information it contains. Other scheme names will also use this word as a prefix, so make it meaningful.

Create a test project with a project key such as ACCTEST. JIRA project keys should generally be as brief as possible since everyone types them frequently. 1 The project name can be more descriptive than the project key. The project key and project name can be changed later on, with some restrictions such as not being able to reuse the old project key. Once this project’s configuration is complete, you can create more JIRA projects and configure all of them in the same way.