How to clone tasks with different assignees

Question

Dear all,

I cloned some tasks so that I would not have to copy and paste them over and over. When I cloned the tasks, I then re-assigned the cloned task to the next person and so on.

Unfortunately, when I did this it sent notifications to the original assignee that the task was now assigned to someone else. On the board, it shows up correctly though with individual tasks and different assignees.

Do you know how I can clone tasks in the future without assignees and just the original content and attachments of the task?

Thank you,

Andrea

PVS · Accepted Answer

Hi @Andrea C.

I believe the only things you can configure for clone functionality are:

* The link type name given to the link created between original and cloned issues
* The prefix added to the cloned issue summary (e.g. 'CLONE - ').

Info about configuring these on JIRA Server is here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/configuring-issue-cloning-861254006.html

There isn't functionality to exclude certain fields (like Assignee) from the cloning process, as far as I know.

A workaround you can do is add a post function to the 'Create' transition in your workflow. For this, you can use the "Update Issue Field" post function and set the assignee field to "Unassigned".

This will ensure all newly created issues (including cloned ones) get assignee set to "Unassigned"

PVS · Accepted Answer

It does sound like you have a set of tasks to execute as part of one process.  I'd be strongly tempted to break it down with subtasks, as you suggest.  You can keep the workflow for the subtasks really simple, and you could even block comments on the subtasks with workflow properties to force people up to the parent to do it.

JIRA does not support many simultaneous assignees on one task because it does not work in real life - you need a clear single owner for a task at any one time (even if you change it lots without updating anything else, it's one person responsible at all times)

Without subtasks, your multiple assignee options are

* to use dummy "group" users
* use a group-picker
* (probably the clearest in this case) to create a multi-user picker to allow many users to be allocated to the issue

None of those work-arounds use the assignee field, so you'd have to educate your users that "no, it doesn't think you're assigned it, but you are because of this other field"

However, on Cloud, you are limited on what you can do, so you're a bit stuck on automatically creating subtasks.