I've been working on Templating in JIRA, without speding a lot of money on a plugin for the 2000 user JIRA that I manage at work.

The first solution was making a TEMPLATE Project and the use of Clone Plus for cloning Issues to the real projects, but the main problem is, that issues in the TEMPLATE project does not have the specific field and field configuration properties for the real project, so tempates can be fully filled before cloning. The solution below works with the standard Clone function in JIRA, but is more flexible with the Clone Plus Plugin, with is not so expensive. 

 

Template Issue Types

So, in the second attempt, I have created a lot of objects that works "in parrallel" of the real isssues, in this case ITIL:

 

Workflow

Each Template is assigned to a very simple workflow:

 

Notifications

And this is sending no notifications at all, and this is pointless, on Post functions, the "Generic Event" is replaced with a new event "No Notifications" I have implemented under "Events" and "Notification Schemes"

 

Screens

As the template are created in real projects, all fields and field-configurations (and components) are present with the Template are created.

 But, in the template we dont want some specific fields present, that are not relevant until cloning the Template to a real issue - typical Date and Person-related fields, so each Template has its own Screen Scheme and Sceen:

Looking like this in JIRA:

with Operation(s):

A sample for the Incident Screens:

Filters

In general, filters should exclude the "* Template" issuetypes.

 

Using Templates 

I use the templates in 2 ways - cloning them from a JIRA Dashboard and referencing them from Documentation in Confluence:

JIRA Dashboard

Documentation in Confluence

Here in the sample, a JIRA JQL selecting the correct "Incident Templates" are shown on the Incident Management Procedure: