Before we start working with projects in JIRA, we need to first understand a little bit about permissions. Permission is a big topic and we will be covering that in detail in Chapter 8, Securing JIRA. For now, we will briefly talk about the permissions related to creating and deleting, administering, and browsing projects.

In JIRA, users with the JIRA administrator permission will be able to create and delete projects. By default, users in the jira-administrators group have this permission, so the administrator user we have created during the installation process in Chapter 1, Getting Started with JIRA, will be able to create new projects, and we will be referring to this user and any other users with this permission as JIRA Administrator.

For any given project, users with the Administer Project permission for that project will be able to administer the project's configuration settings. As we will see in the later sections in this chapter, this includes updating the project's name and description, managing the versions and components, and who will be able to access this project. We will be referring to users with this permission as Project Administrator. By default, the JIRA Administrator will have this permission.

If a user needs to browse the contents of a given project, then he must have the Browse Project permission for that project. This means the user will be able to create and view issues in that project (assume all other permissions allow for it). By default, the JIRA Administrator will have this permission.

As you have probably realized already, one of the key differences in the three permissions is that the JIRA Administrator's permission is global, which means, a user either has it or not. The Administrator Project and Browse Project permissions are project specific. A user may have the Administer Project permission for project A, but only Browse Project permission for project B. As we will see in Chapter 8, Securing JIRA, this allows you to set up your JIRA instance in such a way that you can effectively delegate permission controls, so you can still have centralized control on who can create and delete projects, but not get over-burdened with having to manually manage each project on its own settings. Now with this in mind, let's first take a look at JIRA from the JIRA Administrator user's view.