Can you link multiple JIRA projects?

Question

This is a weird situation but there are times when we have different development teams working on our projects (either multiple different outsourced team or an outsourced team paired with internal developers). Since this is a tricky situation, we would love to separate the work being done by the different parties so that they are not visible to what others are working on but still have the issues/items coming from a universal backlog. The easiest way to implement this would be to have multiple boards on a project but I do not think you can change permissions and restrictions on boards...unless I am incorrect. This is why I am wondering if you can create a parent-child link between projects, or some sort of connection, where the backlog items will act as one but I can have different restricted boards for different teams.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Oh, right, I see.

That's a very different approach, and not one JIRA supports.  If you can see an issue, you can see all of it - assignee is going to leak information to the other team even if you manage to avoid leaks with other fields .  You're not going to be able to get a backlog like that without either
- specifying filters that say "and not in sprint X that belongs to other team" or
- hiding issues somehow

Anand Patel1 · Answer

I may have not been very clear with my confusing question. We do not mind if both parties can see the issues in the backlog, we just don't want one party to see what items are being assigned to and worked on by the other. Probably not the best way of working but just something we need to do for the time being. So basically, there is one backlog of items that all parties can see. Party A would can see which items are in their sprint but not in Party B's sprint...so they cannot see which items we are assigning to the other development team.

Like I mentioned, this is not the best way to operate but just how we are working for now.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

A link between projects would not really be of any help here.  A user can either see an issue, or they can not.

If you hide a set of issues (and the criteria upon which you hide them is not really relevant here - project is the main option, but you could do it via reporter or security levels too), then that's fine.  People will only see the ones they should see.

Your boards will work fine with this setup - they will simply not report on issues that the current user cannot see.  So you can use the same boards for everyone.