Where do the requirements live for 'Watcher' functionality for Jira Cloud?

[Donna Benton]

Is there an article that clearly calls out notification expectations when a watcher on an issue in Jira Cloud?

As a watcher with permissions assigned for managing and voting when will I be sent notifications? I am expecting notifications under these conditions:

• A comment is made to anyone with or without an @ mention
• A checklist item has changed
• Attachments are added or deleted
• Description has changed
• Assignee has changed
• Status has changed
• Hours worked have changed

Are my expectations correct?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Donna Benton 

Notifications are customizable, so you need to look at the notifications that have been configured for the project.

For Company Managed projects Notifications are managed through Notification Schemes that are associated to 1..n projects.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-notification-schemes/

For Team Managed projects the notifications are managed per project and found under the Project settings.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/customize-notifications-in-team-managed-projects/

[Donna Benton]

Hi @Trudy Claspill so if I understand you correctly... if notifications are not enabled at the project level for each of those fields than Watcher will not send them.

The object of turning off all notifications with the exception of @mention and assignment is to keep the users inbox from filling up with the interaction by dozens of users over 100's of issues. The thought was that if you were a 'Watcher' you would have the opportunity to get the notifications that mattered to you on issues you need to track.

Hmmm.... not sure what to do here. Users will set their inbox rules to trash these notificatons and then miss the important ones. Do you have any knowledge of best practices that can help here?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Donna Benton 

With what type of project are you working? You can find that information on the Projects > View All Projects page, in the Type column.

If you don't have notifications enabled at the project level for particular events then no notifications will be sent for those events when they occur.

The recipients of notifications can be customized per event. For the events you have listed you could set the notification to be sent only to Watchers, and then it will not go to other people. 

However, most of the items on your list do not have notification events that are limited only to that item. There are not notification events based on the change of a specific field (i.e Description, Checklist, Attachments). And in some cases the notification event is more specific than what you have (i.e. notification when Assignee is changed to "you" but not for every change of the Assignee field).

You could add watchers to the Issue Edited and Issue Updated notification events, and they would get notifications for most, if not all, changes made to any aspect of the issue.

In Company Managed projects there are some options to create custom events to use in notifications, but then you also have to find a way to fire the event. 

You could create Automation Rules to catch changes to many of the fields individually, and then send an email notification to the Watchers as part of that Automation rule. Sending emails through Automation Rules is separate from the Notifications configured for projects. There are execution limits for Automation Rules, though, and you would need to consider how many executions of these rules would occur.

[Donna Benton]

@Trudy Claspill thank you for spelling this out. I believe I have this understood and taken care of. Thank you for taking the time to explain.

Merry Christmas.