Steps to demonstrate

Configuration:
The best configuration changes are demonstrated to respond to feedback during the demonstration. Besides that, the examples below shall give some good examples for a powerful feature demonstration.

Bringing in externals:
In this example, we want to open up our Jira instance to external users, e.g. customers. The reasoning being that customers should be able to raise issues as well as change requests directly in the development system. However we would like external users to only see those issues that they have raised themselves.

1. Create a new user group for external users and name it 'customers'.
2. Create a Jira user 'Customer Joe' and assign it to the 'customers' group.
3. Open the permission scheme of the project you would like to demonstrate
4. Add the user group 'customers' to the permission scheme and make sure that it only has selected to open and edit its own issues.
5. Open the Jira session as this very user and show that the user sees no issues
6. Create a Jira issue with 'Customer Joe' and demonstrate how the ticket shows up.
7. With another Jira session, log in with a 'Support Manager' user and edit the ticket (e.g. change the version, components, link it to existing tickets, etc). 

Add assignment counter to identify ping-pong tickets:
Especially when working with several teams and functions, it can happen that certain issues are bounced back and fourth. To identify those issues, you can very easily configure a new ping-pong field counter that increments automatically a ticket is re-assigned. Use the following rough description provided by AppFire on how to achieve it:

1. Create a new Custom Field (Number Field), you should use a descriptive name that represents the transition count you want to monitor. For example, let's say I was interested in monitoring the number of times Issues were being transitioned from Development into QA and then back (the classic ping-pong). You could call your Custom Field something like: ""Dev2QAPingPong"".
2. Associate the Custom Field with your Project(s), but within your Field Configurations, make sure to ""Hide"" the Custom Field. Unless you want to make the value visible when viewing the issue.
3. Next, create a copy of your active Workflow associated with the Project you have enabled the Custom Field against.
4. Edit the copied Workflow and click on the Transition name that you would like to monitor
5. Within the Transition, click on Post Functions
6. Within the Post Functions screen, click on ""Add""
7. Select ""Increase value of field""
8. Next, select your Custom Field from the drop down menu

Now, each time that an Issue Transitions through this State/Status, you will be monitoring and incrementing the value by 1. Once in place and active, you will now be able to issue a query against the new Custom Field using the available operators within JQL. Voila, magic is now happening in Jira, ping-pongs are being governed.

Demonstration requirements

You need to have the administrator role on the Jira instance you want to demonstrate configuration capabilities for.

Demonstration on Jira.Atlassian.com

Unfortunately, there are currently no public demo instances where users can change the configuration.

Further documentation

Configuring Fields and Screens