Change Guards needs two things before anyone can use it: the app installed on your site, and a Jira project role bound in each project you want governed. Both are done by a project administrator, and together they take about five minutes.
Before you start
- You hold Administer projects on the Jira project you want to govern.
- Somebody with site admin rights can install a Marketplace app (this may be you).
- You know which group or people should be able to record and approve changes.
1. Install the app
- 1
Find it on the Marketplace
Search for Change Guards, or install from the listing link on this site.
- 2
Review the permissions
The app asks to read Jira work and users, write comments, and use app storage. Nothing else — and it declares no external permissions at all, so Forge will refuse any outbound call.
- 3
Install
Installation is site-wide. Nothing is governed yet — the app does nothing in a project until a role is bound.
2. Decide who your agents are
Change Guards does not keep its own list of members. It uses a Jira project role, so membership stays where you already manage it and removing somebody from the project removes their access here in the same moment.
Most teams use one of:
- An existing role such as Service Desk Team or Developers.
- A purpose-made role, for example Change managers, created in Jira first.
3. Bind the role
- 1
Open project settings
In your project, go to Project settings → Change Guards.
- 2
Choose the agent role
Pick the role from the list. It shows every role that exists in this project.
- 3
Bind it
Select Bind this role. The page then tells you how many named users and which groups the role actually contains, so you can see the consequence of what you picked.
4. Check it is working
- Open any issue in the project. The Change Guards panel should appear.
- Look for the chain lozenge. On a brand-new project it reads Chain empty — no entries yet, which is correct: nothing has happened yet.
- Ask a colleague in the bound role to open the same issue and confirm they see the panel too.
If somebody cannot see it
They will see an explanation rather than a blank panel or an error. It names the role they need to be added to. Add them to that role in Project settings → People and ask them to reload.
What to do next
Record your first change, then set up any freeze windows you already know about — a year-end freeze, a migration weekend — so they are in place before changes get scheduled into them.