How can Automation for Jira add a Comment with a specific Project Role?

[Christoph Päper]

Automation for Jira offers a Comment on issue action. You can choose the visibility of the new comment in the configuration of the action. I want to restrict it to a specific project role, say “Developers”. My user account is a member of this role, therefore this does work if I am the rule actor.

Alas, I want the author of the comment to be the special user “Automation for Jira”. (One reason for that being, that I’m added as a watcher to issues my account automatically commented on; another is that colleagues don’t realise I didn’t add the comment manually.) If I set the the rule actor to be Automation for Jira (which is actually the default), however, the execution fails because Automation for Jira is not a member of that project role:

“You are currently not a member of the project role: Developers. (commentLevel)”

I thought there might be two possible solutions:

1. Add the special user Automation for Jira to my project role Developers.
   This fails because I cannot find this special user in the Add People configuration of the (company-managed) project.
2. Grant Automation for Jira the permissions to add, edit and delete comments at will in the project.
   Alas, the special project role `atlassian-addons-project-access`, which should be responsible for this, already has all these permissions in the active permission scheme.
   Also, this seems to be faded out by Atlassian soon anyway.

This Knowledge Base article (for Jira Service Management) suggests that I could achieve my first solution either by adding the special user by its email address com.codebarrel.addons.automation@connect.atlassian.com or by manually adding it through a mass edit screen I have never seen before at https://{company}.atlassian.net/secure/admin/roles/ViewUserProjectRoles.jspa?accountId=557058%3Af58131cb-b67d-43c7-b30d-6b58d40bd077. The latter option actually worked for me, but that’s hardly maintainable because I (or a colleague of mine) would have to remember to do this whenever we add a new project.

Is there any other, better solution I haven’t considered yet?