Greetings, community!
TL;DR: what do you think about helper functions for rules to diagnose permissions / field visibility symptoms? This could be similar to "find your field" in the Create Issue dialog.
Background:
While recently helping answer a question, I ran into the challenge of Jira permissions and automation rule behaviors. In this case, a rule's use of JQL found issues when checked in the editor but failed to find them when rule execution happened.
My understanding is when JQL is checked in the rule editor, it uses the person's permissions who is editing the rule. But when the rule executes, it uses the rule actor's permissions. As the Automation for Jira user's permissions cannot be checked by customers, this can be frustrating to diagnose. Sometimes leading to contacting Atlassian Support to investigate.
The root cause for this question was the issue security schema for the project had been changed earlier. As the issue searches with JQL worked "as designed", there were no errors to show; the only symptom was the rule silently failed to perform as expected: there were no issues found to process. Because the schema had been changed long before the rule was created, no one thought to test all potential impacts to Jira features, particularly those not yet used (e.g., automation rules).
A potential improvement could be built-in rule diagnostics, used to identify when issues and fields are not visible to a rule. A simpler approach could be to always test rule JQL using the actor, but that will not make root causes visible. Instead consider a feature, like "find your field", where an example issue and field are supplied, and the reasons why they are not visible display, along with remediation actions / links.
Thanks for your thoughts on this suggestion!
