How to grant read permissions to a collection of stories in a project for outside groups

[Jesse Eversole]

On our project we currently have admins, developers and users that are tied to AD groups. These groups have minimum read access to all stories in the project. What we would like to do is add groups that have more restricted read access.

For example, if the project has 5 stories 1-5, we would like to add a group that could only read stories 4 & 5 so we need a mechanism to group stories 4 & 5 and associate those stories as a collection with a specific AD group. Also, when creating a new story we need a way to associate the story with the collection.

I've been told I can do this with issue security levels and schemes, but I don't quite understand how to do that to achieve that described above.

Anyone who might have done this type of thing before?

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Jesse,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

You are correct. Your requirement can be achieved using Security levels. Please, let me better explain how it would work:

An Issue security level is basically a custom field that restricts the access to an issue only to the users/groups that are properly configured to it in the Security Level configuration page.

The issue security levels are organized by Issue security schemes. That been said, when an Issue security scheme is added to a project, you can add the related security levels to this issue by editing the security level field.

Using a practical scenario as example:

- Let's suppose you have 3 groups: A, B, C. 

- In your project, you have 5 stories: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

- You need the story 1 to be accessed only by group A

- You need the Stories 4 and 5 to be accessed only by group C

Here would be the steps to properly configure it:

1 - Navigate to JIRA Settings > Issues > Issue Security Schemes > Click to Add a new security Scheme

2 - Once you create your Security Scheme, click on Security Levels and add two Levels: 

Security level A - Add the group A to it

Security level C - Add the group C to it

3 - Once the levels are created, navigate to your project > Project settings > Issue Security > Add the Security scheme to your project

4 - Navigate to your project > Project settings > Screens > Add the field security level to your project screens

5 - Navigate to the Story 1 and add the Security level A

6 - Navigate to the Stories 4 and 5 and add the Security level C

For more information about this feature, please check the documentation below:

- Configuring issue-level security