Freeze Mode for Jira — Documentation

Freeze Mode puts a Jira project into a controlled read-only state during sensitive windows — audits, migrations, financial close — and cleanly releases it afterward. It works at Jira’s permission layer: freezing swaps the project’s permission scheme for a locked-down copy that keeps existing view access but removes every write grant. The same people can still see the project; nobody can change it.

Who can freeze

Only a global Jira admin (a holder of Administer Jira) can freeze or release a project. Project admins cannot freeze, and — importantly — cannot lift a freeze on a project they administer. Every freeze and release entry point is gated on a verified global-admin check.

Getting started

Install the app from the Atlassian Marketplace. After install you’ll find Freeze Mode in Jira administration.

Freezing projects

1. Open Freeze Mode and choose the projects to freeze. The picker lists company-managed projects only (see limits below).
2. Add a reason / reference (for example, the audit ticket). This is recorded in the Freeze Log and is visible only to admins.
3. Optionally name an exemption group — a single, pre-existing Jira group whose members keep write access during the freeze.
4. Confirm. Each selected project is frozen independently.

Freezing is batch-friendly but not all-or-nothing: if one project is already frozen or errors, only that project is skipped — the rest freeze normally. The result tells you which projects were frozen and which were skipped.

What a freeze blocks

During a freeze, the following are blocked for normal project work: editing issues, commenting, attachments, worklogs, issue links, and issue creation and deletion. Viewing and browsing are unchanged.

Workflow transitions are best-effort blocked and fully detected: any transition that occurs on a frozen project during the window is surfaced in the Freeze Log, so a leak becomes a documented event rather than a hidden gap.

A freeze is read-only for normal project work, not tamper-proof immutability — global site-admins and admin-context automation can still bypass project permissions. This is a documented limitation of the permission-layer approach.

The Freeze Indicator

Anyone who can browse a frozen project sees a Freeze Indicator panel on its issues, telling them the project is frozen and who to contact. The free-text reason is not shown here — it lives only in the admin-only Freeze Log. This turns Jira’s cryptic permission errors into a deliberate, visible control.

Releasing a project

Release returns a project to its prior editable state by restoring its original permission scheme. v1 is manual release only.

Release is best-effort: it restores the original scheme when that scheme still exists and the project is still on the locked scheme Freeze Mode created. If the original scheme was deleted, or the project was moved to a different scheme through Jira’s own admin UI while frozen, Release does not blindly overwrite — it surfaces the anomaly and drops into a guided manual-recovery path where you choose the scheme to restore. The anomaly is recorded in the Freeze Log.

The Freeze Log

Every freeze and release is recorded in the Freeze Log — a durable, append-only record that is your audit trail. Per freeze it captures: the admin who froze, the target project, the freeze and release timestamps, the exemption group (if any), the original-scheme pointer, any release anomaly, and any transitions detected during the window.

The log is tamper-evident: the app exposes no edit and no delete for entries, timestamps are server-assigned, and entries are hash-chained so out-of-band tampering is detectable.

Scope and limits (v1)

• Company-managed projects only. Team-managed (next-gen) projects manage their permissions independently and don’t participate in shared permission schemes, so the freeze mechanism can’t lock them.
• The Project is the unit of freeze — you cannot freeze individual issues, boards, or sprints.
• A project can be in at most one active freeze at a time; freezes do not stack.
• The exemption group is all-or-nothing in v1: exempt members regain the full write set, and the log records that the exemption existed and who was in scope — never what those members did.
• Release is manual only in v1.

Data, permissions, and privacy

• The app runs entirely on Atlassian Forge and stores its data in Forge hosted storage inside Atlassian’s infrastructure — nothing leaves Atlassian.
• Uninstalling the app permanently deletes the stored Freeze Log.
• See the privacy policy, terms of service, and security policy.

Support

Questions, bugs, or feature requests: support@davidleetech.uk