Problem definition

Currently JIRA projects can only have a single key associated to it. This is undesirable on certain circumstances.

Suggestion

The idea is to provide aliases for project keys. For instance assume you have the process of having two distinct projects in JIRA for a single project "Foo". One for development and one after the project was released:

Project key: FOO (for released builds)
Project key: FOODEV (for development builds)

Before the project goes live, you only set-up the FOODEV project in JIRA.

It would be great if you could specify a project key alias to FOODEV called FOO which can then be used to look-up FOODEV issues as long as the alias is active.
At the point the project is released you can then remove the alias and add a FOO-project.

The net outcome is that all your employees will always work with the "FOO" project key and it will automatically use the FOODEV-project during the early development phase while later it will automatically use the FOO-project.

No more need to rectify the long project key names for administrators.