Support dual password management in LDAP and JIRA

The title might sound a bit illogical, but I hope that I can explain the reason for stating it like this.

In principle, we are using LDAP external password management for our users – maybe 90% are managed like this.

Recently, however, we have set up a number of test and demo user accounts using JIRA alone, with passwords that we entered in the relevant boxes when creating the user account. These users also have email addresses that would be invalid for LDAP authentication: they do not exist on this server. However, this dual system does work and offers us a very useful flexibility in managing JIRA: our JIRA admins are not the same as our IT sysadmins, who manage LDAP and other backend systems, and it is useful to set up demo accounts without bothering the sysadmins for additional accounts each time.

Please advise if this is a bug or a feature and what the Atlassian policy is: if "external password management" really means external, then the password fields should not be shown on user creation, nor should it be possible to create a user with an email address that is invalid for the external authentication system (as noted above).

We do not think that the system should be so inflexible, however: we would very much like the flexibility of managing some blocks of users using JIRA and some using an external system. However, in this case, JIRA must be able to recognize which system is managing which password.