Feature affected by a bug?

[Inna S]

Hi, 

when we report a bug, the reporter marks the 'product feature' that is affected by the problem.

We are migrating from another system and have tons of features in the product.

What is the preferred way to have the 'affected product feature' information in the bug?

The list of features is long and growing and we are looking to have the product owners (Dev or QA) have an ability to add entries there without the need to call for Admin's help.

Thank you,

Inna

[Trudy Claspill]

There is a field in Jira Software projects called Components. This is a multi-select field. The list is project specific and can be maintained by users assigned to the Project Administrator role in the project. The Components values added to one project are not available in another project, though multiple projects may have their own Components with identical names.

If you assigned your product owners to the Project Administrator role in the project, then they would not have to request help from a higher level admin to manage the list.

[Inna S]

Thank you, @Trudy Claspill , this is an interesting workaround. Though I'm not sure Features can be expressed as Components. What if we need to have components too?

[Trudy Claspill]

The only other native multi-select field option that is available that does not require a Jira Administrator to maintain is the Labels field. Anybody can create a Label value, and Label values are available across all projects.

The other option is to use Team Managed projects. Team Managed projects are intended to be stand alone. They don't share any of their configuration with other projects, and the workflow, issue types, and custom fields can be maintained by users assigned to the Administrator role in the project.

If you haven't worked with Team Managed projects before, do your research before having your teams go down that path. The functionality in those projects is more limited than Company Managed projects. Trying to do any sort of cross-project roll up reporting is more difficult because the configurations of every project can be different and none of those configuration items are shared.

Lastly you may be able to find an app in the Atlassian Marketplace that can provide some added functionality. I've not looked for one to solve this particular type of problem, so I don't currently have any recommendations.

[Inna S]

Thank you, @Trudy Claspill . At this point we are aiming at using company-managed projects for the sake of simplicity. I also have an issue with the add-on security so trying to limit those to the bare minimum. 

Do you know if we can have a user-run automation rule that would add an entry to the otherwise read-only custom multi-value field?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Inna S 

Can you expand on the idea you're asking about for using an automation rule to add and entry to a "read-only" field? Jira Cloud does not natively support field level security, making fields read-only for some users and editable for others.

It is possible to use the Automation feature to update a field. You have to specify an Actor for the rule - the identity the rule runs as. This can be set to the user who triggered the rule, another specific user, or the Automation for Jira user, among others. By using that setting the Automation rule can run under an identity that has different permissions than the person that triggered it.

[Inna S]

Hello @Trudy Claspill ,

we need to be able to specify the affected product feature on every reported bug.

The list of features is supposed to be a drop-down, single selection list.

Someone has to populate this list initially (say, admin) and then maintain it by adding entries as we grow.

I'd want to give this task of maintaining the feature list to the dev team lead. So this person (role) would be able to update the field, but all the rest would be able to only pick up a value from the list.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Inna S 

I have not found any built-in method for doing this.

Two options you could consider:

1. Create your own solution that leverages the REST API and a service account for authentication, that provides your dev team leads with an interface that allows them to maintain the list.

2. Look for a third party app that would help. In another post on this same topic @John Funk suggested use of an app that connects Jira to external sources for data for some fields.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/23337/elements-connect-external-data-fields?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

I've not tried either of these options.

[Inna S]

Thank you, @Trudy Claspill .

The app is interesting, but I'd rather have all the relevant data in this same system and not to disperse it, for several reasons.

Someone suggested elsewhere to store the project-related data of this kind in a dedicated Jira project, in form of a custom fields on issues.

So I've created the team-managed project, made a custom issue type called MyProject and now have several custom fields on these issues to store the data.

While the feature list is not exactly the project metadata, that this solution was proposed for, I guess it could be used for this purpose too.

The only thing left is to figure the way to pull the list from a custom field in a project A into another custom list in a project B.

Do you think this may work?

Thank you.

[Christophe Promé]

Hello Inna & Trudy,

I work for Elements, the maker of Elements Connect.
Thanks Trudy for proposing our app.

Inna, while I understand that you prefer to avoid apps, I can't resist telling you that with Elements Connect, you can populate select list with Jira issues from a JQL.

You can use it to create a Select list from the "Software features" stored in your Jira project.

We have published a tutorial that explains how to configure this use case: https://doc.elements-apps.com/elements-connect-cloud/how-to/using-a-local-jira-project-as-a-light-weight-asset-manager

If you have any questions about Elements Connect, please feel free to make an appointment with Juliette - the Product Manager of Elements Connect: https://calendly.com/juliette-lallement/30min

You can also contact our support team: https://support.elements-apps.com/

Regards
Christophe

[Thomas Opiolka - codefortynine]

Hi @Inna S ,
Another third-party app option I'd like to bring into the discussion is External Data for Jira Fields, which lets you sync external field options with a native Jira multi-select field. 

The configuration is called Field Options Sync and is explained here. You can also use Local Jira as a data source to manage the values with a dedicated project if needed

I hope this helps.

Disclaimer: I am the product manager of said app.

Regards,
Thomas

[Inna S]

Thank you, @Christophe Promé and @Thomas Opiolka - codefortynine .

I'll check the apps out.