You will often have problems where the issue only happens to a particular user. In these cases, you will have to either sit next to the user in order to see and understand the problem, or reset the user's password and log in as that user.
In this recipe, we will look at how you can switch your current session to any other user's session, without having to reset or get hold of the user's password.
For this recipe, we need to have the User Switcher add-on installed. You can download it from the following link and install it with the UPM:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.tngtech.jira.plugins.schizophrenia
We first need to configure the add-on using the following steps:
- Navigate to Administration | Add-ons | Manage add-ons.
- Select the User Switcher for JIRA add-on and click on the Configure button.
- Enter the group that should be able to switch users. Leave it blank for the jira-administrators group only.
- Enter the group that you can switch to. Leave it blank if you want to switch to any other user.
- Click on Save to apply changes.
- Now perform the following steps to switch your user session in JIRA:
- Press the X key on your keyboard twice.
- Select the user you want to switch to:
After you have selected the user, you will be automatically logged in as that user.
We first configured the User Switcher add-on to place some restrictions on who will have access to this feature. You would normally want to restrict this to the administrators group only.
The User Switcher works by selecting a user of your choice and switching out of your current active JIRA session's username to the target user; it is just as if you have logged into JIRA as that user.
There is also another commercially paid add-on called SU for JIRA. You can download the add-on from the following link:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.dolby.atlassian.jira.jirasu
The SU for JIRA add-on works similar to the User Switcher add-on, allowing you to switch your current session to another user. It has some other features, such as keeping an audit trail of all the switches.