Assigning roles to multiple users

Question

We have a number of JIRA projects on the same JIRA instance. There's a large number of these projects (between 80 and 100) that each needsto provide the same access (generally read only) for dozens of users (production support, horizontal support, product leadership, etc.).

I was thinking it would be great if we could enable our product owners, scrum masters, and Kanban leads to import the roles for the users - something similar to being able to import issues. Is that possible? If not, is there some alternative that could be used to support this need?

Daniel Ebers · Answer

Yes, this is based on the fact they would have to maintain the group for you (in case the group is one that must be maintained in Jira directly).

That means: you must consult them for every onboarding/offboarding in the teams - this can get a cumbersome job for them so I see their point.

Exception is if you maintain the group via external tooling (LDAP/AD) that you have access to -or- (even better) it maintains itself via a (semi-)automatic logic which puts them to a (say) jira_read_only group which is filled with people from: HR, product management and product development (and so on).

Geoff Mether _Togetha Group_ · Answer

Ahh, thanks @Kyl for context.

I'd agree with @Radek Dostál

"In general for any broader access-permissions that's what user groups are for and can easily be added to existing roles."

"Adding users to a group in bulk is as easy as pasting a comma delimited list of usernames"

Create the groups and then assign groups to project roles.

Note: If this was an on-premise solution (not-cloud), you could modify or create the Permission Schemes to open up the projects to read only to everyone.  I don't really like this solution as generally there will be people on your network that shouldn't have access (contractors/etc).

Kyl_9joebx · Answer

Thank you for the helpful answer, @Radek Dostál The team that manages our shared JIRA instance has been somewhat resistant to implementing groups, so we were trying to see if there was another way to achieve our desired end state.