Question from a new site-admins.

[Francesco Santi]

Hello, community

My name is Francesco and i'm new on Jira.

i have 2 question;

1)Are the programming languages necessary for site-admin user or administrater user?

2) What are the skills to be a good site-admin user or administrator user?

Thanks.

[Bastian Stehmann · Accepted solution]

Hi @Francesco Santi

welcome to this community.

1) You do not need programming skills for Administration, it is all configured within the UI.
 Programming skills may be useful if you want to use some Add-Ons like ScriptRunner, because you can add scripts there to do things.

2) This is not simple to answer. This are just some points I think a good Administrator should have. A good administrator is good in understanding requirements from the users and knows how to realize them in Jira but also needs to be able to be strict in some cases and not fulfill every wish a user has. The administrator should be well organized and keep the system organized as well, because it will be very hard to maintain if there is no structure within.

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

From a practical standpoint I suggest immediately modifying the permission scheme JIRA gives you. REMOVE the jira-user or any other group that allows users to logon. This leads invariably to questions about trying to restrict access to a project.

Then create project roles that make sense in your environment like developer, tester, QA, Browse Only, etc. Then add those roles to your permission scheme. Since project roles are universal you should be able to create one or two permissions schemes that will cover all your projects. Using project roles also allows the project admin to manage access to their project and gets the JIRA admin out of the loop if you were to use different groups, which only a JIRA admin can manage. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Also, go to Admin -> Project roles and go over the "default members" for each role.  

Jira's default is to stick the "can log in" group into "Users", which leaves you in a right mess very quickly (unless you really do want an open-to-all automatically Jira).  I'd condsider leaving "jira administrators" in the role of project administrators, but for the most part, you want those default role members removed.

[Danyal Iqbal · Accepted solution]

Hi @Francesco Santi,

Read a good book about administration and try to establish those practices in your daily work life. I would recommend Practical JIRA Administration (o'reily). Its outdated but its cheap and contains good advice for new admins.