This article will be useful for those of you who do the interviews for Jira Administrators or participate in such interviews as candidates. Some questions that are asked during Atlassian Certified Professional exams can also be very useful for job interviews. However, you do not have to use any official questions from Atlassian materials. It is not too difficult to develop your own questions. See my 10 example questions along with video use cases.

Jira interview questions about Workflows

Question 1: Can you add new transitions to existing workflow statuses?

Yes, adding new transitions is possible

Question 2: Can you delete a status from an active workflow?

Yes, but only if there are no issues in this status. Otherwise, if you try to delete such status, you will see a warning note: We can’t remove this status for you. There are issues in this status that need to be moved to another status or project before we can remove this status. Please contact your Jira administrator if you need assistance.

Question 3: Can you change a name of an active workflow?

No, it is not possible. You would have to copy the existing workflow first and while it is inactive, change its name. After that you would need to reassign it to the workflow scheme what would initiate migrating of all issues that use the workflow you are replacing.

Question 4: Can you change a status name of a status in an active workflow?

Yes, technically yes. However, changing the status name in one workflow will affect all other workflows where this status name is used. That is why it is so important to give statuses fairly universal names so they can be used in many contexts without the need to change their names. It is best not to change the status names if possible, because you will need to change all JQL queries where these names were used to filter results.

Question 5: Can you add new statuses and link them with existing statuses in an active workflow?

Yes, it is possible because adding new statuses and transitions will not have any effect on existing data.

Question 6: Can you delete a transition in an active workflow?

Yes, there is no limitation to adding and deleting transitions in active workflows. The only thing to remember is that sometimes there might be some scripted dependencies or automations between transitions so deleting one transition may corrupt some more advanced configuration.

Jira interview questions about roles and permissions

Question 7: What can you do to make sure that the same users with extended permissions in one project will have less privileged permissions in another.

You need to assign these users to different roles in the same permission scheme. You do not have to create two different permission schemes in this case. Atlassian recommends to use shared configuration objects as often as possible and thus decrease the effort required to maintain Jira configuration.

Question 8: What do you need to do, in order to divide users into separate groups with unique levels of permissions in Jira projects?

You need to create dedicated global roles which can be used in shared permissions schemes. Creating roles is a global change so it is best to design a global roles model which will be universal enough so its names are applicable to various contexts. For example, you could have roles like Project Manager, Project Member and Project Reader. Then to each role you will assign appropriate permissions in one shared permission scheme. Having the same permission scheme for two or more projects, all you have to do is to assign specific users to appropriate roles which have the permissions you wanted these users to have.

Jira interview questions about e-mail notifications

Question 9: You have just created a new Jira project from a template. After some time Project Administrator complains that users of this project receive a lot of e-mails from Jira. What you should have done when creating a new project?

Creating new Jira projects from built-in templates utilizes many default schemes such as Default Notification Scheme. This scheme, if no one has modified it, includes all notifications possible for all Jira events such as Issue Created, Issue Updated, Issue Closed etc. These notifications are by default sent to Assignee, Reporter and Watcher. That is why a Jira Administrator should remember to replace a Default Notification Scheme with a different notification scheme with only necessary notifications (such as for example Issue Assigned).

Question 10: You inherited a Jira instance recently. Your users complain that they receive all possible notifications, even with their own changes when they create or comment issues. What setting do you need to change?

Go to Default user preferences for notifications which can be found in Jira System settings. Make sure that the setting ‘Users should not be notified about their own changes’ is set to Yes.

Bonus Question: Your notification schemes are very limited and only send notifications to Watchers. The problem is that your Project Managers who are using Jira to manage projects, create hundreds of tasks for their entire projects and receive hundreds of notifications. What can you do to fix that?

You can instruct you users to decide if they want to be added as Watchers automatically in all tasks being created by them. This setting is set to Enabled by default and can be disabled if needed. Go to user preferences in user profile and change it there

Before you go…

A good candidate for the position of Jira Administrator is a mixture of many qualities, skills and should also be a cultural fit. It is worthwhile to have available a few practical questions that will help you quickly understand the level of expertise of the candidate. You can use the questions from this article or develop your own.