Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 1. Groups Versus Roles

Overview

The difference between JIRA groups and JIRA project roles seems to confuse many JIRA administrators. This chapter explains the differences and what each one is good for.

JIRA originally just had users and groups of users, and no project roles. Groups were pretty powerful—wherever you could do something with a user, you could generally use a group instead.

For instance, if you wanted to allow a specific user john.smith to change the Reporter field in a project’s issues, you could:

1. Create a new permission scheme with a description something like john.smith can change Reporter.

2. Next, add the john.smith user to the appropriate Modify Reporter permission entry in the new permission scheme.

3. Change the appropriate JIRA project to use the new permission scheme.

You could also do the same thing with a group:

1. Define a new JIRA group named Can Modify Reporters.

2. Add the user john.smith to the new group.

3. Create a new permission scheme with a description something like Added an extra group of users that can change Reporter.

4. Add the group (instead of the user) to the appropriate Modify Reporter permission entry in the new permission scheme.

5. Just as before, change the appropriate JIRA project to use the new permission scheme.

Both of these approaches now allow john.smith to change the Reporter field. So far so good, but there are two main problems with using JIRA groups like this: scaling and updating.

Scaling

If you want john.smith to be able to edit the Reporter field ...