Does it ever make sense to have multiple assignees for an issue in an issue tracker?

Question

I've been a JIRA and Bugzilla admin in past jobs, and have quite often had users ask for the ability to have more than one assignee per issue.

I know this is possible in JIRA, but to my mind it never makes sense; an issue should represent a piece of work, and only one person can do a piece of work (at least in software, I've never used an issue tracker for a 2-man bobsled team ;-)) A large piece of work will obviously involve more than one person, but I think in that case it should be split into subtasks to allow for accurate status reporting.

Does anyone have any use cases where it's valid to have multiple assignees ?

Barbabra

Answer 1

The Assignee field means many things to many people. A better name might be "Responsible User". There are three cases I discuss with my clients:

A. number of assignees = 0 JIRA has an Allow Unassigned issues option but I discourage use of that because if a work item isn't owned by anyone it tends to be ignored by everyone.

B. number of assignees = 1 The default case

C. number of assignees > 1 Who is responsible for the work item represented by the issue? The best case I've seen for this is that when an issue can be handled by any one person in a team, so before triage the issue is assigned to everyone in that team. I think a better approach is to create a JIRA user with an email address that sends to the whole team, and assign it to that user. Then a member of the team can have the issue assigned to them in particular.

Changing the one assignee case has the history recorded in the History tab. Nothing is lost in that case.

Backstroke

Just one additional note here: I like the Unassigned Issue option more than to have an assignee that does not have time or does not feel responsible for it. It is easy to check on a regular base which issues are not assigned, and then to work on them. Another option we have done in the past is to assign them to an NN user, or to add a label / tag. – Mcpeak

Answer 2

I'll often have a story / feature that can be split across multiple developers. They will have individually assigned subtasks but it would make sense to assign the parent to all involved, unless there's a lead developer. I wasn't actually aware that I could do multiple assignments, so thanks for the tip!

The other case I can think of is pair programming.

Spoils

I like more that one person is responsible overall, and sub-tasks are then individually assigned to the developers. – Mcpeak

Answer 3

I hit upon this question while looking for solutions to doing this. Since I want to do this, I'm guessing my use case counts as an answer to your question: I only really want one assignee in the sense of someone currently working on a problem, but I want to track the whole lifecycle of an issue. For us, that can mean:

1. A support person receives a report from a customer, creates an issue
2. An issue-wrangler reviews the issue to make sure it's valid, not duplicated, has all appropriate details, etc.
3. A developer implements/fixes the issue
4. A tester performs whatever tests are appropriate (in our case, mostly extending our automated testsuite to additionally test the feature/fix)
5. An operations person rolls out the new version to a test environment
6. A support person informs the customer, who does his own tests with the new version in the test environment
7. An operations person rolls out the new version to production

Not all issues necessarily go through all steps. Some issues have more steps (e.g. a code review between step 3 and 4). Many issues will also move backwards among the steps (developer needs more information, we go from step 3 to 1 or 2; tester spots a problem, we go from 4 to 3).

At each stage, only one person is actually responsible for whatever's got to be done. Nevertheless, there are a whole bunch of people who are associated with the issue. Tracking systems we've used are happy to offer easy changes to previous owners of the issue (shown as a list), but I'd ideally like to go a step further, with the owner automatically reverting to the correct prior owner depending on the issue's status. At step 6, the original support person from step 1 should ideally contact the customer. At step 7, the ops person from step 5 would ideally be the assignee.

In other words, while I don't want multiple assignees for a given step, I do want there to be a "support assignee", a "developer assignee", a "testing assignee", etc.

We can do this with subtasks and we can do it by manually selecting previous owners when changing statuses, but neither is ideal and I think the situation above is one where multiple assignees would make sense.

Wendalyn

Answer 4

In my company, we have a similar workflow to Nikhil. We work in a scrum model, with developers, testers and a technical writer on each team.

The workflow of a development task is

Development -> Developer review -> QA testing -> PO Acceptance -> Done

The workflow of a QA task is

QA writes test case / automated test -> QA review -> Done

We had a tool which JIRA replaced that allowed us to assign multiple people to a task, which we found very useful for our workflow. On a QA task, I could easily see if the other tester on my team had already done work and I needed to do the next step.

Without this, I am finding it difficult to quickly identify tasks written by the other tester on my scrum team which are ready for me to review (versus the ones I wrote which they need to review).

So many people have asked for the ability to have multiple assignees since at least 2007. They have varying, valid use cases. I was disappointed that the JIRA development team unilaterally said they won't implement this and would ask them to reconsider.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-12841

Doll

Answer 5

1. While pair-group working (pair programming etc..) it would be nice to assign both persons to the issue.

2. Tasks move through different steps through development (example: Development, review, testing). Different persons can be responsible for each step. Even though the task may be in review or testing, the reviewer will have stuff fore the developer to fix. Having different roles to assign to would help organizing the work.

In our team we usually develop 1 or 2 persons together. Then the code is reviewed by around 2-5 persons in individually or in pairs Then it is tested by 1-2 persons initially, finally tested by the whole team.

Currently our system allows us to assign a single person at a given time. That limits our ability to follow who is working on what without looking through the log for the issue. The benifits of beeing able to assign multiple persons would be good for us.

Rhines

Answer 6

What happens if John is assigned a task and cannot finish it, and it is moved to Jane's list because John was a slacker?

Are you OK with losing history of who it was originally assigned to, and the hours that were spent / billed on it?

Catamite

That's not the case I'm talking about. It's common to reassign an issue to different people before it's complete, but I was asking whether it's ever appropriate to assign an issue to two or more people at the same time. – Barbabra

You don't loose the history in JIRA, it is visible (if your want) who was the issue previously assigned to. – Mcpeak

It's not just about history but also about being able to see clearly who contributed a particular piece of work. If user A did 90% of the work and then reassigned to user B to finish the last 10% I would prefer that at a glance it does not appear that user B is the go-to-guy/gal on the issue. – Alemanni

Answer 7

In an e-Learning scenario, it makes sense to have an issue assigned to multiple users. Here is what I want to do: I have a storyboard which I want to assign to 3 people at the same time - the animators, the recording artists and the graphic designers. Once these people finish their tasks, they will pass it on to a common reviewer, who will review and close the issue. Graphically it would look something like this:

                   Storyboard
                 /     |     \
           graphics animator recording
                 \     |     /
                    reviewer
                       |
                     done

The three job roles depend only on one storyboard. The compilation of the three have to go to a reviewer. I'm racking my brains to get this working on redmine. Haven't found a solution yet.

Seychelles

Answer 8

Got this answer from an Atlassian partner https://www.isostech.com/solutions/ and then later from Atlassian

Objective: Want to set who does the works for each step on an issue

Summary: Use a plugin to copy values from custom fields into the assignee field whenever the issue transitions to a new step.

How: 1. Install the Suite Utilities plug-in: This plug-in adds a bunch of new functionalities to workflows.

You will use the plug-in to copy the value of a custom field to the assignee:

2. Create a custom field as single user picker for each role i.e., dev, tester, reviewer to be assigned at different steps in the issue

3. Add these fields to the issue type's screen

4. Modify the post-function on the workflow transition between each step Add a "Copy Value From Other Field" post function and set it to copy the value from the appropriate user custom field into the assignee field.

Slumgullion