Allowing only product owners to write acceptance criteria
- Maxime Lefebvre
- Pascal Perreault [Okapya]
You need administrator rights in Jira to perform the tasks on this page.
It can be a good practice to limit who can add, change, or remove acceptance criteria. In theory, since the product owner is responsible for creating the criteria in the first place, it would make sense that only they should be able to manage them.
To enforce this, you’ll need to create a new role and assign it, and then configure your checklist so that only users with that role have editing rights.
Although this example is for product owners and acceptance criteria, you can easily adapt this procedure for other roles and checklists. The possibilities are infinite!
Creating a new role
Since permissions in Checklist are based on project roles, the first step is to create a new role that will be assigned to only the product owners. We’ve called ours “Product Owner”, but you can name your role whatever you like.
Go to Administration > System.
In the sidebar, go to Security > Project roles.
In the Add Project Role section, enter a name and description for the new role, and then click Add Project Role.
Assigning the new role
Now that the new role is created, it’s time to assign it to the product owners:
Go to Administration > Projects.
Click on a project name in the table.
In the middle panel, click Users and roles.
In the top right, click Add users to a role.
In the Users or groups drop-down, select the user(s) who you want to assign to the role. As soon as you start typing in the text field, matching usernames will pop up.
In the Role drop-down, select the role you just created and click Add.
Configuring a checklist’s editing permissions
You’re almost there! The final step is to configure your checklist(s) so that only users with the new role can modify them:
Edit the parameters of your checklist (for details, see Editing parameters).
In the Access Control tab, enable the Edit Roles parameter and select the role that you created from the drop-down.
Disable the Reporter Can Edit parameter.
Make sure that the All Can Work on Items parameter is enabled.
That’s it! Only the users with the role you created can now add, edit or delete items. Other users can still check items off and add statuses, due dates, and assignees.