Jira ghost user changing priority of bug tickets

[Jordan Trinklein]

We have a user in our system called "Product Bugs" that keeps changing the status of our bug tickets. No one owns this user and we can't figure out how it was created or what it's purpose is.

Has anyone every come across something like this? Is it an integration? Any ideas on what would happen if I deleted it? 

[Sayed Bares [ServiceRocket]]

@Jordan Trinklein do you have any automation rule or any scripting app which could have done this? is there a trigger when the priority changes? like a specific time or a specific action? 

[Jordan Trinklein]

No automation rule in the Jira project of the affected issue that would cause this. We don't have automation rules that change priority field. The trigger doesn't seem to be tied to anything, it's happened twice and it's been at random.

[Sayed Bares [ServiceRocket]]

@Jordan Trinklein I suggest reaching out to Atlassian support and see if they can find anything from the backend logs. There could be many reasons on why this is happening and you will need to find the root cause of it. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jordan Trinklein 

Here are a few things you can check.

Click on the Rule Executions field (in the Details panel when viewing issue details) on one of these issues to see if the execution of an Automation Rule might be responsible for this change.

Do you have any third party apps installed? Review the vendor documentation for the apps to see if they have functionality that might be causing this.

[Jordan Trinklein]

Hello @Trudy Claspill 

We don't have a Rule Executions field on this issue type.

We have some very basic third party apps installed (zendesk, pivot reports, zephyr scale, planning poker, xray) but none would mess with the priority of our bugs. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Rule Executions is not a field you add to the issue types. It displays automatically.

I have not worked with any of those apps, so I don't have any direct experience that would tell me if they require a specific user account for their integrations with Jira.

If you go to User Management is the Product Bugs user listed there? You could try deactivating the user first, to see what else might break before you take the irrevocable step of deleting the user.

[Jordan Trinklein]

Ah, I see now.

Here is what appears when I click Rules Executions. I don't see anything that has to do with updating the priority field. 

The user "Product Bugs" is listed there. I was wondering if that might be a good experiment. 

[Trudy Claspill]

So, the output shown from Rule Executions indicates there were several rules run against that particular issue 2 months ago. Is this an issue that had its Priority change by Product Bugs? If so did the date of that change coincide with the execution of these rules?

[Jordan Trinklein]

@Trudy Claspill 

No. The first time Product Bugs made this change was May 23rd at 1:45 PM, and then it did it again on June 28th.

[Trudy Claspill]

That suggests that the change is being made by...

- a person logged in a Product Bugs

- an API call, possibly from an integrated product

- another automated process like a script somewhere in your customizations.

What is the email associated with the Product Bugs user? That might give you some additional clue about the purpose/source of the user.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You may need to read all the rules to see what they are doing - the summary for them is human thing, for giving other humans a rough idea.  They don't have to explain everything!

You might also want to check if you have Scriptrunner, or other scripting tools that might be triggering changes.