Original request description:

I'm working on rolling out JIRA to a Big 10 University in the U.S. We anticipate the potential to have hundreds or possibly thousands of projects in our installation. One of the features we are keen on being able to offer our faculty is the ability to create a series of tasks organized into milestones (versions) such as phased assignments, research projects, etc. Ideally each instructor will be able to create task collections in a "master" course template, and clone out entire filter sets (including relevant issues and versions) to a collection of other projects belonging to their students. At the beginning of the course, the instructor could bulk copy these assignments and tasks out to each participant student's personal time management project, and they'd each have a unique copy of the tasks, organized into version milestones. Right now, I envision this will involve the following:

1. The ability to create a project with tasks tied to given milestones. This functionality exists in the present version of JIRA (3.7.2)
2. The ability to bulk copy (clone and move) an entire project milestone, including all relevant issues, to a list of projects. This feature does not presently exist.
3. The possibility to deny the ability described in item 2 above to a specific list of users on the server.

I am willing to build this custom feature myself, but will need to purchase a source license first. However, the functionality might warrant a place in the default JIRA installation.

The advantage of being able to do this in a default installation of JIRA is that it would simplify multi-project installations for all Open Source communities.

EXAMPLE: all new projects need to perform basic project set-up chores (all administrivia you need to do to start an Open Source project, for example:

• creating username on the appropriate servers,
• setting up your ssh public keys,
• mailing list tasks,
• web site,
• source repository publication,
• adding developers and managing permissions,
• producing unit tests,
• documentation,
• first release

All of these common tasks could be grouped into a "Getting Started" milestone that server admins could clone out to all new projects. We used to run into this problem at the CodeHaus all the time. The Apache software foundation also has a long list of things that all new projects must complete in order to become an official TLD. These tasks should be able to be auto-cloned wholesale to one or more existing projects from a master template.

I think having a case study on how to tie JIRA-based task management into the traditional academic enterprise would significantly increase the academic interest in this product. I saw some other issues out there that sort of batted this concept around, but nothing definitive or even that descriptive. I can't estimate how long this might take to implement, but welcome any suggestions or feedback from the JIRA development team.