How to restrict editing permissions without affecting the creation of tasks

[黄森]

Background:
The roles in my current project can be summarized into two types: SPM and SE. Our workflow is roughly as follows:

• S1: After confirming requirements, the SE creates an Epic for a product in their own project (SEs and SPMs belong to different departments, and this JIRA Project is maintained by the SE’s department).
• S2: The SPM analyzes the detailed requirements and creates a development task under this Epic.
• S3: The SPM switches the assignee of this development task to the SE.
• S4: The SE completes and closes the development task.

Actions Taken:
To restrict SPMs from editing tasks after assigning them to SEs (i.e., SPMs can only edit tasks they newly create until reassigning them), I implemented the following:

• O1: Set both the "Assign Issue" and "Edit Issue" permissions to Current Assignee.
• O2: Added an automation rule: Automatically set the assignee to the Creator (the SPM who created the task) when a new issue is created.

This ensures that whether an SPM creates a task from scratch or clones an existing task (where the assignee field would otherwise retain the cloned task’s value, typically an SE), the assignee of the new task is the SPM themselves. The SPM can then edit the task before assigning it to the SE. Once assigned, the SPM can no longer edit the task because they are no longer the assignee.

Problem:
However, when an SPM tries to fill in the Epic Link for a newly created task, the system requires edit permissions for both the task and the Epic. This means:

• The SPM must be the assignee of both the task and the Epic to edit the Epic Link.
• In reality, Epics are usually owned by SEs, not SPMs.
• Manually transferring Epic ownership to SPMs is impractical, especially since multiple SPMs may create tasks under the same Epic.

Question:
Is there a way to resolve this issue? Are there alternative suggestions to achieve the desired outcome?

[David Friedrich]

Hi @黄森 , welcome to the community!

Are you using Jira Cloud or Data Center?

In both deployment options, it should be possible to set up an automation / workflow action as a work around. However this means, that the automation user will set the epic link and not the SPM user. So you will not be able to see, who actually edited the ticket.

If it is only for setting the Epic Link I would advice to try to solve this on an organizational level, meaning either the SPM tells the SE to set it via comment or you all decide on a less strict permission scheme where both roles can edit all issues.