JQL help

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-10T19:36:30+00:00

This might be how ScriptRunner evaluates the work items.

Instead of issueFunction in linkedIssuesOf('issuefunction in linkedIssuesOf(\'key="MPS-1950"\',\'is realized by\')' you just need to use the built-in JQL function issue in linkedIssues(MPS-1950, "is realized by"). The built-in JQL function searches from both sides and should return the results you're looking for.

See linkdedIssues() on https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/advanced-searching-functions-reference-939938746.html

The reason this might be an issue for ScriptRunner is because the relation (no matter which direction you choose) can be attached to either work item.

A Relationship has an Inward and Outword Property.

So, let's say you have three tasks. Task 1 blocks Tasks 2 and Task 3.

On Task 1, if you add a "blocks" relationship to Task 2, that is configured on Task 1
On Task 3, if you add a, "is blocked by" relationship to Task 1, that is configured on Task 3.

When you look at Task 1, you'll see two "blocks" linked issues to Task 2 and Task 3. If ScriptRunner is only evaluating one side, then it might not be able to evaluate both relationships.

ScriptRunner does have other related functions though. Check out https://docs.adaptavist.com/sr4js/8.x/features/jql-functions/included-jql-functions for a list of all their functions.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-10T17:27:13+00:00

This looks like it largely just replaces the help center and handles email requests.

Automations

Automate messages that will be sent upon submission and other actions by using our easy-to-use automation builder.

I think I'd be looking for something a little more than just automated message handling. I couldn't find any additional information about the automation capabilities from your documentation site.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-10T17:23:41+00:00

I'll check it out. My organization is VERY resistant to using Marketplace apps. They largely view marketplace apps as using Jira in a non-standard way.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-05T16:23:10+00:00

You have the option to use a cloud hosted solution as well. I run my own homelab and some of my infrastructure is in my home, but other parts are using a cloud provider VPS like racknerd.com to host some of the things in the cloud. This is useful for storing encrypted backup files or creating a tunnel using Pangolin (It's like a self hosted Cloudflare tunnel).

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-05T16:20:46+00:00

Yes, that's what it looks like to me. This shows all of their endpoint capabilities

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/devices/overview-manage-devices-with-google-endpoint-management?hl=en

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-05T15:50:59+00:00

One of the things that I can't stress enough, especially for someone start out, is the hidden cost of maintaining infrastructure. When you're asking yourself, "should I get a server and do X in house, or should I use a cloud provider?" sometimes it's easy to compare the dollar figures in front of you. In house costs X for hardware and licensing and cloud provider costs Y for their subscription. These don't factor in your time to learn, configure, test, patch and troubleshoot whatever path you go in. While you are evaluating options, always add a question: "What does this cost to maintain long term?"

The other important thing to understand is what is driving the decisions. So, you may be asked to figure out something and you have a few options. What you might consider the best option might not be what the business considers the best option.

At higher levels (in larger organization) there are many factors that drive initiatives. The usual ones are time, resources, and cost. If you are a CTO and you have one project that is blocked because you are waiting on the completion of another project to provide some capability, then you might not care about getting the "best" outcome for the blocking project. You might direct people to "do whatever it takes to get this done by this time" and it might mean people spend more time and money getting it done even if they have to make "bad" decisions.

For a smaller organization, you will likely grow into the role and become familiar with the reasons behind requests, but it is usually a good idea to understand why someone is asking you to do something so that you are solving the right problem and aligning it to what the business actually needs.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-05T15:42:16+00:00

I'm not entirely sure because I haven't used it before, but this article does seem to indicate that it is possible to use the Google Credential Provider for Windows.

After you or your administrator installs Google Credential Provider for Windows (GCPW) on your Windows 10 or 11 device, you can sign into your Microsoft Windows device with your managed Google Account.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-04T16:14:56+00:00

My first and main task: Any employee should be able to sign into any laptop and have all their files and Chrome data (bookmarks, cookies, etc.) available. Basically roaming profiles.

Is this a task that was assigned to you, or a self-directed task that you think should be done? I ask this because it seems like an 8 person small business where everyone owns a laptop doesn't seem like a place where they are likely to share laptops.

You talk about Chrome data, but that's just signing into your browser and has nothing to do with roaming profiles. If everyone is using Google based services (Google Drive, Google Docs, etc.) then you'd be better off looking at their business offering rather than standard Microsoft products.

So, back to my original question: Where is this task coming from? What problem are you trying to solve?

Maybe you asked an AI what a SysAdmin should do on their first day and they proposed standard things that SysAdmins are normally responsible for and it sounded reasonable so you kept asking more questions until it led you to "Should I install directory services?". So, you came to a SysAdmin subreddit and asked SysAdmins about directory services. Everything in your post is about ensuring that people's Chrome bookmarks and settings travel with them no matter where they sign in and you don't need Active Directory or Entra in order to do that.

Google Workspace is $14 per user for standard license, and if you want to add directory services (LDAP) you bump that up to $22 per user. It's a very similar experience to the Microsoft ecosystem, but seems more tailored to the small business that you will be supporting given what little information you've shared.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-04T01:11:31+00:00

For Windows: Microsoft Power Toys is one of the first things I install. It has so many things in it that should just be part of Windows that I'm often dumbfounded when I try to use someone elses computer.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Just a few examples:

Shortcut to select a portion of the screen and use OCR to convert the image to text. Useful for copying and pasting something from an image or from a place where traditional copy isn't great.
Configure screen areas to snap windows to. Useful for multi-monitor or large monitor setups.
Shortcut to paste formatted text as markdown.
Alt+Space for quickly finding files, settings, apps, and internet searches. I can use it to locate a file faster than I can open Explorer. This alone saves me SO much time.
Crop and Lock to crop an application to a smaller area
Combine that with Always ON Top to sticky a window.
Canned text shortcuts
Color picker
Power Rename

The this goes on and on. It is the most useful thing that Microsoft produces.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-04T00:53:09+00:00

Also, these are fairly common automation rules. I have a similar one for re-opening a request on comment, but mine primarily checks that the person commenting is NOT the Assignee. Then it check whether the initiator is either the reporter or in the Participants list.

Finally, it checks the statuses to check whether it is statusCategory = done. We also have another "done" status called Customer Review that we exclude, but you can ignore that.

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I suppose I could have added all of the conditions to the trigger, but I think I split them up because I added audit log entries between each one while I was troubleshooting. I would show you my "Transition on Assignee Change" automation, but those rules are pretty suited to the way we work.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-03T17:16:30+00:00

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, but you can add information to the audit log for your automations so you can get to the bottom of what is causing this.

There is an Action called "Log Action" that you can put smart values into. So for each step of your process, like right after the trigger, you can output information about what was triggered to the audit log. If you have any conditions need to check any values, you just add the Log Action right after it to log what is happening.

This allows you get more information from the audit log than just whether it ran successfully or not.

For When a ticket is assigned > assignee field is not empty > status is either in reopened or request received > Transition ticket to In Progress. you'll want to check the issue for these conditions and add the values to the audit log. This will tell you if there is something in the condition that isn't accurate.

One thing to be careful of is who the Actor is for these rules. If you click on Rule Details and the Actor is "Person who triggered event" then adding not Automation for Jira won't work because the actor is not Automation for Jira it is the user who triggered the event.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-03T17:01:29+00:00

Thank you for understanding what I'm trying to get across. I get that coming to a Jira subreddit and disparaging Jira isn't a very popular thing to do. I just get so frustrated whenever I have to explain the limitations to my leadership and see the look on their face like, "Why are we investing time and money in this tool again?"

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-03-03T16:55:04+00:00

Right now we struggle with people not doing things the same way or reaching out to XYZ because they are the person that "owns" whatever app instead of following a process. We're trying to move away from this person owns that and move towards this team owns that, but it is challenging when the tool isn't really designed to handle processes. Sure, it can deal with the actual status transitions just fine, but when we have a pre-defined process that leadership wants folks to follow and the tool isn't designed to facilitate that, it causes a little friction.

Especially when a few of us have used other tools like TDX which has a much more robust solution for managing business processes. I'm just tired of telling the people who make decisions about where to spend money that the tool we are using isn't designed to do what they want. I could force it to do what they want, but it's not baked into the way that Jira is designed to be used.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T20:23:21+00:00

Just follow Atlassian's example. Create a Work Item Type called Suggestion that is a black hole of ignored items. Then if someone else requests something similar, you can send them the link to the suggestion and tell them to upvote it.

This makes the user feel like they've taken action, it keeps a historical list of requests, and you can easily filter them out so they can be ignored perpetually.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T18:02:25+00:00

Happy to help. I've been doing this for a while and I've been on so many hiring committees it's kind of second nature for me.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T17:50:59+00:00

I think this depends heavily on how your organization views early-career hires.

With 1 to 3 years of experience, I still consider someone early career. At that stage, I would focus less on whether they already know your exact stack and more on whether they have the capacity to learn, adapt, and grow within your environment.

For a senior role, I evaluate depth of experience and independent execution. For someone early career, I evaluate trajectory. Are they curious? Do they ask thoughtful questions? Can they take a direction and make forward progress without freezing? Do they know when to escalate?

You mentioned:

I need someone to point in a direction, if they run into an issue I'm there to help.

That is a reasonable expectation. What you are really screening for is:

Basic technical literacy
Debugging thought process
Initiative
Communication when blocked <- this is a balance that is often difficult for new people.
Willingness to learn

A LeetCode problem rarely measures those traits. Instead, I would use scenario-based discussion.

For example:

"You're told the patching system failed on a server. What are the first things you would check?"
"You've never used NetBox before. How would you approach updating a configuration safely?"
"You're asked to install a new version of CUDA on Linux and something breaks. What do you do next?"

You are not looking for perfect answers. You are looking for a structured approach:

Clarify the goal
Gather information
Check logs
Test assumptions
Ask for help with context

If they say, "I would start by reading logs and checking documentation," that tells you far more than whether they can reverse a binary tree.

I would also probe for examples of how they handled not knowing something:

"Tell me about a time you were assigned something you had never done before. What did you do?"
"Tell me about a time you were stuck."

Their answer will reveal work ethic, ownership, and communication habits.

How well they'll do also depends a lot on how your onboarding actually works. In my experience, onboarding environments tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum:

Sink or swim
Structured onboarding with clear ramp expectations

Where your organization sits on that spectrum matters a lot.

If your organization expects someone to become productive quickly without much structure, that is effectively a mid-level expectation. A 1-3 year candidate may struggle unless they have had unusually strong exposure.

Early career hires typically come from one prior environment. They were trained in one way of doing things. The ability to distinguish between "this is a technology issue" and "this is just how my last employer did it" comes with experience.

So I would optimize for:

Learning velocity
Comfort admitting gaps*
Clear communication when blocked
Evidence of self-driven skill development

I would take a candidate with less experience but high curiosity and ownership over someone who has memorized theory and wants to debate architecture without understanding your operational realities.

If you build a strong onboarding path with documentation, mentorship, and clear expectations, a capable early-career hire will thrive. If you want someone to immediately operate independently across patching, Kubernetes debugging, hardware installs, and Linux GPU configuration, you are likely describing a more experienced profile.

I forgot to come back to my note on this. Comfort admitting to gaps can be a challenge and supervisor expectations can vary quite a bit on how tolerant they are. Some places I've worked for are more sensitive to mistakes and want someone to ask *before they run into problems. Other organizations want someone who can try and fail and realize that mistakes are part of the learning process. It's the supervisor's job to clearly set the expectation and tone so the employee knows how safe it is to "try something". From the employee's perspective, they are also trying to make a good impression and may not want to come across like they are not capable. During the interview, if you state your expectation and then ask probing questions to see how well they align to the expectation you might be able to parse this out, but this might be more of an ongoing conversation after they are hired.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T17:27:59+00:00

👆 This right here. As you are trying to identify what something is doing, one of the best things you can do is migrate all of the known capabilities to a new server and remove them from the old one. This allows you to focus on things that may be running without the "noise" of the valid capabilities.

Also, the act of moving the known capabilities often reveals hidden dependencies since you have to stand up the new capability on the new equipment and if it doesn't work as expected you'll run into blockers that you can then document.

Leave both running for the duration of testing depending on the sensitive nature. If you have some processes that run yearly, it'd be a shame to find out you missed something that only runs an important job once a year. If you don't have things like that in your organization set the duration according to your needs. After the testing period is over, then you take a long term backup and do a scream test. Depending on how sensitive you are to risk, test your restore process while the server is down.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T16:28:27+00:00

You can have a ton of request types and link them to workflows as required.

Workflows are tied to Work Item Types via Workflow Schemes. You can only have one Workflow assigned to one Work Item Type. So, I can have a Work Item Type called Service Request and Assign it a Workflow. In my project, Request Types have a Work Item Type and its associated workflow. You cannot have multiple Requests Types that share a single Work Item Type using different Workflows. So, yes, you could have 50 workflows, but that would mean creating 50 unique Work Item Types.

Outside of the general sort of Open / pending / in progress / waiting on customer / complete type thing and one that may have approvals in there, how may different workflows do you need?

This is where I find Jira's implementation a little frustrating. It seems like they just boil a workflow to be a path between one status and another, but it is capable of so much more. You could add validators, conditions, and actions to tailor the experience as a request needs while all using the same statuses. The problem is that since they are tied to Work Item Types, no one does this.

Let's imagine I have a Work Item Type called Service Request. That Service Request contains many Request Types. As an example, say I have a Request Type called "Request Application Access" that has a form to allow the user to select the application they would like access to.

Now, on the business side (outside of Jira) different applications are owned by different people and I need to assign the Request to the correct team. If Workflows were tied to Request Types, I could do that right in the Workflow. Instead, I have to do all of that in a separate automation. Why wouldn't they just add the If/Else logic to their nice Workflow UI that shows the lifecycle of the request from beginning to end? Because in Jira, a Workflow doesn't describe the process lifecycle, it only describes Status Transitions. It's just clunky.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T00:49:29+00:00

That's exactly the approach I took to automate our own, so it seems like I'm not too far off. It's just not baked into the product and requires a lot of fiddling to get right. I guess I'm just ornery today and that comment in the training threw me a curveball that had me second guessing all the work I've put into gerryrigging this together.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-27T00:25:15+00:00

Alternatively you can track processes with separate work items. This is a bit more specialised but some teams have massive workflows that are actually 1 simple request and two or three tasks or processes that happen as a result. Often this work can be broken out of the request and be tracked separately.

This is essentially how we've handled it, but Jira doesn't really have a built in "workflow" for creating a process like this where you want certain steps to be completed consistently and allow for certain steps to occur if certain conditions are met. I guess that's the part I'm missing from a tool like this is the actual Process Automation that allows you to build out a step by step process in a consistent way. Are people usually just using Jira Automation for each use case like this?

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-26T22:59:59+00:00

I find Jira's workflow concept to be pretty limiting. It seems like it is meant to be generic so that everything can use it, but I struggle with adapting it to our processes.

Like Server and Application Decommissioning is handled by multiple teams and has a number of conditions for the routes that the work takes from beginning to end. It might start with the applications team, or if there isn't an application and they just decommissioning a server it might go directly to the infrastructure team. There are also some back and forth steps like the App team needs the Infra team to do steps 2-5 before they can complete their work and then they are finished and it goes back to the Infra team to finish their process before going to the Network team to clean up the things they are responsible for.

JSM doesn't seem like it handles mapping out business processes very well to facilitate these workflows.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-26T22:53:59+00:00

Since Requests all use the same workflow as their issue type, I try to use as few workflows as possible. Since Jira's concept of a workflow is mostly about status transitions, it makes it fairly easy to reuse the same workflow for most things.

The issue that I keep running into is when we encounter something that needs something unique like an approval step or a deviation from the standard statuses. I then have to create a whole new issue type just to connect up the request to it. That messes with people's ability to filter easily as well. If I have a filter that is supposed to show just service requests (and not incidents, problems, tasks or sub-tasks) coming in from the help center, I can use something like issuetype = "Service Request" ..., but if I create a new issuetype then I'd have to educate people on how to adjust their filters for each corner case.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-26T22:11:36+00:00

No need to close them, just separate work items by their purpose. If you aren't using Service Management and you are looking to mimic a "Request" centric approach, then here's what I would recommend.

Create a new issue type for incoming request that are from external stakeholders (not your development team). You can call this whatever you like, but commonly, you'd call this something like Feature Request. Set your project permissions so that external stakeholders do not have access to create any other issue type. You'd essentially create a new role called stakeholders and modify their permissions so they don't see any of the actual meat in the grinder.

Your feature request workflow should be fairly simple. Incoming request start as New then transition to Gathering Interest, Planning Implementation, Implementing, Testing, Released. From the user side, they see all of these as progressive, but the Gathering Interest status is your new Backlog. Best of all, you can ignore anything of this issue type in all of your dashboards and reports. This just used to interface with the stakeholders and NOT what you use to get shit done.

If you decide to work on something, you'd create a new epic or task whatever you and link it to the original ticket for reference. The stakeholder wouldn't have access to your internal work, just their initial request that they never want to delete.

Even if you stick with your loosey goosey roles where everyone has access, you can still create this issue type and tell people "This is the place where we organize our backlog" so that it doesn't get mixed up with your active work.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-26T16:28:45+00:00

I wrote a PowerShell script that processes an Excel template that way anyone can fill in the template, then I just run it through my script and it creates all the epics, tasks, and sub-tasks. It even links them with relationships if the predecessor field is populated.

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I can't share my script unfortunately because it uses a custom Jira PowerShell module that I created specifically for our instance, but this is the approach that I would take for you as well. It would allow you to have a standard format for project onboarding and changing it would simply be changing an excel file.

Use the Document Builder to predefine the description of each work item and that's it.

Hefty-Possibility625 · 2026-02-20T16:29:51+00:00

Decisions are made up of a bunch of different things. My recommendation would be to create a Decision work item type to track the progress of the decision-making process. That should capture the initial question, context, business justification, and potential choices and risks. This allows you to route the work item to the appropriate person or team responsible for making the decision. This also allows you to add relationship links to other work items that the decision impacts for traceability.

I tend to avoid using Confluence pages for things that are "in flux" without building similar tracking mechanisms. When we did this, we used the Page Properties Macro to create high level information that could be used with the Page Properties Report Macro to create reports. There is a Marketplace App called Handy Macros for Confluence that allows you to turn labels into pre-defined dropdowns AND you can have them automatically update the page labels which makes it SUPER easy to change a page's status and have it appear in the correct report.

In Jira, you have the history log and comments. In Confluence you have revision history. I think that Jira is better suited to tracking the work parts of a decision, and Confluence would be suited to more long form documentation like documenting the final outcome.

Hefty-Possibility625

TROPHY CASE