Card layouts: How to make teamwork more visible on company-managed Jira boards

[#1]

G'day Atlassian community!

Are you part of a team where pair programming is the norm? Do you often wish you could show on your Jira board that multiple people are working on the same work item, but find yourself limited by the Assignee field, which only supports one user?

While the current design of the Assignee field is single-user only (an assumption deeply embedded in Jira's codebase), there are still ways to communicate this effectively in Jira.

In this post, I'll show you how to use card layouts in company-managed spaces to make teamwork more visible, in conjunction with an extra User Picker field alongside Assignee. Card layouts are a small but powerful tool which are available for Kanban boards, Scrum boards, and Scrum backlogs.

Please note: This feature is specific to company-managed spaces.

After we've finished, the cards on your board will have this new addition:

How to show multiple users on your board's card layout

For the following steps, you'll need permission to create custom fields and edit your board. If not, ask your Jira admin for help. This example uses a company-managed Kanban space.

Step 1: Create a 'User Picker' custom field to store collaborators

Go to Jira admin settings > Work items > Fields and add a new 'User Picker' field. You can choose either a 'single user' or 'multiple users' – whichever suits your use case best. I chose 'multiple users’ and named the field 'Companions' for this example.

Step 2: Add the new field to your space's layout so it's available on work items

Go to your space's Space settings > Work items > Layout, edit the layout for your work type, add your new field, and save.

Step 3: Update your board's card layout to display collaborators

Go to your board's settings: Board settings > Layout > Card layout.

Kanban boards: Add Assignee and Companions field (up to three fields).

Scrum boards: Add Assignee and Companions under Active sprints. Card layouts can be applied to boards or backlogs (up to three fields each).

Step 4: View your updated board and populate the fields

Set values for Assignee and Companions on your work items. They'll now appear on your cards!

You can toggle card layout items at any time from view settings.

Step 5: (Optional) Apply the same layout to your Scrum backlog

To customize the cards for Scrum backlogs in the same way, go to Board settings > Layout > Card layout under the Backlog section, and follow the same steps.

Limitations and things to know

Please note that this doesn't change how Jira treats the Assignee field. There is still a single assignee for Jira things like workflows, permissions, and reporting.

The new User Picker field that we created is for visibility and communication only. You can filter and search by the User Picker field, but some built-in reports and gadgets may still only use the Assignee field.

And, again, the card layout functionality we're using here is specific to company-managed spaces.

Summary

We created a new User Picker custom field and added it to the appropriate work type layout. Next, we updated our board's card layout settings to display both the Assignee and the new User Picker fields directly on each card.

We've made it easier to see at a glance who is collaborating on each task, helping our team run more teamwork-oriented standups.

If your team uses other clever ways to make pair programming or mobbing work more visible in Jira, we'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Jacqui Shadforth 

I have used this 'hack' previously and I agree it is very useful. Thanks for the "Limitations and things to know" section :) that pretty much covers what I was going to type out here :)

I really would like visibility of their profiles too, similar to how you see the assignee profile image. The other aspect worth mentioning is the Team field which also aids in a task shared with a group of users.

I must say that I enjoy and appreciate the time you took to set up that the board with those tasks, profile icons and all :)

Thanks

[Dave Mathijs]

@Jacqui Shadforth Thank you for sharing these insights.

Question: How does Atlassian handle the security bug that collaborators with Browse Projects permission automatically see all Jira Spaces (Projects) names and keys and thus can - potentially - discover the names of sensitive (internal) projects on that site?