We are now starting development using Jira.
I currently have a team of 5 software engineers who can work on different projects and also on the same project a few times. What is the recommendation to use Jira? Do I create projects by "projects" or by team? How does the board formatting work in this case? When would you use an Epic?
I would like to understand cases of using Jira for you.
You should create a project per a project in your organisation, most likely it will reflect your organization structure. When it comes to the boards, you can display issues from several different projects on a single board so all members of your team can do a standup meeting without boards switching (Read more about boards here). To the epics, consider creating an epic if you have a large user story that you want to split up into smaller chunks. You could also create an epic if you notice a pattern amongst several user stories you've created, and you want to bundle them into one group (you can read more here and here).