How do you show the people on a project?

[monkeypunch]

In the Project screens is there a place where I can list all the people on the project?

Screenshot from project page:

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not really. Because there's no easy rule for "on a project".

First, you need to look at the permission scheme and work out which of the 30-40 permissions in there mean a person is "on a project". For example, is it people who can see the project? Or be assigned issues? Or report them? Or work on them? Or a combination?

Second, you've got who-can-do-what. Using the simple case of "can be assigned", then you could put a group into that permission. Or a role. Then you put users into the group. Or the role. And you can put groups into roles.

Then you have the added complexity of dynamic roles. For example, if you say "people who are 'on a project' are those who can be assigned issues", then what happens when you put Reporter into that permission? You've now got a swathe of issues that have different reporters and hence are 'on the project' but only because they've raised one issue. Or lots.

A summary of that rambling is "no, because Jira doesn't know what your rules are, and it's a lot more complex than most people realise even when you've got rules"

[monkeypunch]

Hmm... Let me rephrase that. I only have one project. I invited a developer to my project and I want to see if he accepted. I may invite a few other people to the project.

I'm guessing it get's more complex if you have multiple projects?

[monkeypunch]

I found a link to User Management in the Settings drop down menu. I think that's sortof what I'm looking for. If I have multiple projects then it may be hard to distinguish which users are on which project. So far I only have one project.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, that's a start, but you still need to define how you know "This user is on this project". User management will tell you about their profile and the roles and groups they are in so you can see most of the data you probably need to answer the question, but you'll still need to read the permission scheme to see what the implications of role membership are.

[monkeypunch]

So how would you solve this? Is this a shortcoming in the Jira user management system?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The first step to "solving" this is to clearly define how you know "the user is on this project". There's nothing you can do until you have decided on that.

[monkeypunch]

They are on the project if I invited them to the project. Why won't that work?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a good start. Next step is to translate that from a human explanation of a relationship into how Jira is going to understand it.

Put it this way - you "invite" someone to the project. What does that do in Jira? How are they then included in the project in Jira terms?

[monkeypunch]

So I created a brand new project and then I clicked User Management. It is showing ALL users even the users I just invited to the first project!

I don't want all the users I've invited to see all the projects I'm working on. They have nothing to do with the other projects!

How do I solve this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

My guess is that when you say "invite", you mean "invite to use Jira" and you have got a simple permission scheme that lets all Jira users see your projects.

You are going to need to decide exactly what access you want to grant by default and how you want to allow the various projects to control their accesses. As a result of doing that, you will be forced to generate your own answer to "how I include people in a project", because you can't do the setup without knowing that.

Once you've decided on an access model, we can help you work out how best to do it in Jira.

My usual advice is to use roles, extensively, and go through your permission schemes and remove the use of the default group "jira users" completely, so that membership of that group means ONLY "I can log into Jira". That may not be right for you, but it's a good model to start from or criticise to form your own.

[monkeypunch]

How about this. When I invite someone to a project, then it automatically adds them to a project specific role.

Put another way, when I create a project, let's say, "My Cool Project", Jira then creates a MyCoolProjectMember role. Then when I invite that person to "My Cool Project" project, they are automatically added to that role.

Then, when I create another project, "My Other Cool Project", I can send an invite to that person, and maybe that person already is in Jira already, then they accept the invite and they are automatically added to that role.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is no function in Jira to "invite" someone to a project. Because it has no way of knowing what your rules for "on the project" might be.

It sounds like you have finally got something resembling a rule for "in a project", but you are misunderstanding roles.

Even if there were an "invite to a project" option, you REALLY don't want it to create a new role for each project, because then you need to change the permission scheme to add that role to each project. That would make roles totally redundent, because they go across all projects.

What you really want here is for the user to be added to a role that has "user can do X, Y and Z" in project in the permission scheme.

For example, if you use the role of "user" (which is in your Jira by default and is set up in the default permission scheme to have browse, create, and several other powers), then you finally have a simple rule for "on a project", which is "user is in the role of user in the project"

And as an admin, you can do that, and add them to the role. The only bit missing is the "invite", which is now simply a matter of you remembering to email them to tell them you've added them to a project.

Going back to the "no invite" problem - note that the example I've given is "user is in the role of user in the project". But it could be "role of user OR tester", or "user is in a group" or "user has create permission", or or or. You need to define the rule and how you're going to do it (then there's a feature request for Atlassian to add an invite function, but it needs to be able to handle rules)