Atlassian Jira. Admin evolution. Part 1

[#1]

Hello!

In this series of articles I will show you how the same task can be solved in many different ways in Atlassian Jira Server/Data Center.

I will solve this task with different skillsets and understanding of Atlassian Jira. I will start with the lowest quality solution and move to higher quality solutions.

After reading this series of articles you will be able to understand what is the quality of solutions you have in your Atlassian Jira.

I will not produce the complete code of the task for each solution. My goal is to show techniques which can be used to configure Atlassian Jira and let you understand the quality of each of the techniques.

Task

We need to create an Approval process for our company. It will be a very simple process but enough to create all types of solutions.

Here is the workflow for our issues:

Here is the business process:

• during creation of an issue the manager of the reporter should be set automatically as the approver of the issue in the Approver field. The Approver field should not be available for editing.
• the manager of a user must be taken from a lookup table. The lookup table should be managed by a lookup user who does not have admin access to Jira or access to the database.
• only the user in the Approver field can transition an issue from the "On Approval" status to the "Ready For Work" status.
• if the user in the Approver field has left our company (we deactivated this user), then the Approver field should be set with the head manager in our company.

The lowest quality solution possible

How would I approach this task if I knew nothing about Atlassian Jira?

DB Table

If we want to set the manager of the reporter as the approver of an issue automatically, then we need a lookup table where we would find information about the manager for each user. How to have this lookup table? Of course, we can create a table in our Jira database. And I will create one. I use Postgres for my Jira instance that is why I will take my favourite GUI for managing Postgres database and create a table:

I provided user_managers as the name of the table and added two columns: user and manager.

Now we need to let our lookup user to edit this table. We can not grant access to the database to the lookup user. We need somehow to create a UI in Jira to let the lookup user edit this table.

How to do that?

Part 2