Can I add a dummy user to JIRA?

unknown

I wanted to create a dummy account in JIRA. This dummy account will be used to assign tasks to external users (consultants) in our JIRA instance. We don't want to share that with external users. but this will enable us to keep external users (consultants) accountable for their tasks. 

If there's another method for this - I'm open to best practices! Thank you all! 

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @[deleted]

Welcome to the community.

You said you don't want to share it with external users, but you want to be able to hold the external users accountable. How do you see implementing that accountability if you have one generic user representing all the external users, and they don't access Jira? Will there be somebody within your organization who will be responsible for interfacing with the external users to get updates?

If there is somebody internally responsible for ensuring the accountability of the external users, I would suggest it would be better to assign the issues to that internal user. If you want to track that work for that issue is being handled by external users then I would suggest using another method to flag the issue, such as adding a Label or Component, or even adding a custom field. The custom field could be a single checkbox that when checked means the task is assigned to an external user, or it could be a text field allowing you to note some fact about the specific external user (name, email, etc).