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 created during the installation process in Chapter 1, Getting Started with JIRA, will be able to create new projects. 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 of this chapter, this means that users with this permission will have access to the Project Administration interface for a given project. This allows them to update the project's details, manage versions and components, and decide who will be able to access this project. We will be referring to users with this permission as the 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 that the user will have access to the Project Browser interface for the project. 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 it is global across all projects in JIRA. The Administer 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 separation of permissions allows you to set up your JIRA instance in such a way that you can effectively delegate permission controls, so you can still centralize 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 quick look at JIRA from the JIRA Administrator user's view.