Breaking update to default project permission schemes

[Jasmin Bateman]

Our CI/CD pipelines are critically impacted due to unexpected changes in Jira Cloud project permissions and issue types.

Without any modifications on our side (to either user permissions or project permissions), projects created by our automated tests suddenly no longer allow users (including site admins and project leads) to delete issues. This has broken all of our automated test setup/cleanup processes and is blocking delivery pipelines across multiple instances.

We create projects using the following template via the REST API (${baseUrl}/rest/api/2/project):

com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira:gh-simplified-basic

Recently, we have observed two major issues with this template:

1. Permission changes – Projects created from this template no longer allow issue deletion, even for site admins.
2. Issue type changes – The Story issue type appears to have been removed.

These changes occurred without any configuration changes on our side and without any documented communication from Atlassian.

Can Atlassian confirm:

• Have there been intentional recent changes to the default permission schemes or to the behaviour of this project template?
• Where can we find official release notes or communications describing these changes?

Request:

• Please confirm whether these changes are intentional.
• If this is the new expected behaviour, can you recommend an alternative project template that:
  • Supports Epics
  • Allows issues (including Epics) to be deleted by project administrators or site admins

This undocumented behaviour change is proving highly disruptive and is costing us significant time to investigate. If Atlassian intends to modify core project templates this dramatically (removing permissions and issue types), there should be clear announcements and warnings to avoid breaking customer pipelines and ongoing work.

We would appreciate urgent guidance to unblock our delivery pipelines.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jasmin Bateman 

This is a user community. I recommend that you open a support case directly with Atlassian for this question. Support cases can be opened by Application and Organization admins at:

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/

You can also review the weekly blog post to see if there was a change announced there:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2025

[Jasmin Bateman]

Thanks for the tip @Trudy Claspill, but I have already raised the issue through multiple support tickets (developer and standard support), and have responses claiming there have been no changes to the default permission schemes. Raising the issue here as well to hopefully get some answers more quickly and see if other users are experiencing the same issue.

[Trudy Claspill]

I will be interested to see what you learn from here.

I have not been creating projects through the API so I have no previous experience to compare to what happens now.

Looking at what the API documentation shows for templates for Software type projects, I would guess that the "agility" templates are for creating Team Managed projects, the "classic" templates are for creating Company Managed projects and the "basic" template would be equivalent to using the "Bug Tracking" template available in the UI.

Having created projects months ago through the UI using the Bug Tracking template I see that they don't include the Story issue type, and the Permissions Scheme applied includes giving the Administrators role (as well as the atlassian-addons-project-access role) permission to delete issue.

I am working on a Free subscription, though, which may be different than what occurs in a Standard subscription.