Custom fields for a extensive Service Desk Project

[Steffen Becker]

I am struggling for many days on the question "Which Custom Fields & IssueTypes should I create for my Service Desk Project?".

Following scenario:

- for various reasons, we want different teams to use the same SD project

- everything is IT related, but with various topics, like "create new VM", "Create new Jira project", "Create new git repository", "Update permission" etc.

- Some of these tasks should be automated (e.g. automatically create new git repo after request was created)

- for every Request type, we would like to have some custom fields for better automation and for better validation of the inputs (instead of just having one description field and nothing else), for example, we need "repo name" and "team name" for the "Git Repo Creation"-Request - or we need "Project name", "project lead" and "project admins" for the "Create Jira Project"-Request

- this leads to the question: should we create ALL of these custom fields? I don't like this idea because it's more maintenance, maybe performance impact and we have to take care about that only the necessary fields occur on the request (e.g. as a service desk agent, I don't want to have a "repo name" field in a "jira project request"-ticket)

- Or we create only a few re-usable custom fields like "generic_text_field_1", "generic_user_picker_1" and so on. We can change the display name for the customers in the portal, but I'd also like to change it for the agents. This may could be achieved by creating many new Issue Types and createing a 1:1 mapping between Request Type -> Issue Type: Therefore I could use ScriptRunner to change the field name based on a condition like

def field = getFieldByName("generic_text_field_1")
if (IssueType=="Git Repo Request") { 
  field.setLabel("Git Repo Name")
}

 But I am also not very happy with this solution because it requires many more IssueTypes - this also may have a performance impact, requires more maintenance and having such a 1:1 mapping is somehow against the idea of SD.

- last option I can think about is to just having "generic_text_field_1", "custom_user_picker_1"and so on - but without changing the label on agent side. Therefore we don't need multiple new IssueTypes, but (a) all agent teams need to know about it ("generic_text_field_1 means git_repo_name in my ticket") and (b) I'm not sure how I can automate things when "Create Git Repo" is exactly the same IssueType as "Create Jira Project": How would the trigger look like?

I know it's a complicated scenario, but maybe someone has a good idea.