Multiple assignees changing issue status

Question

Cheers, I have a modified workflow for my company. I added a custom co-assignee field (for issues requiring development from two departments). And there is a problem with having both assignee and co-assignee fields. If one of them switches from ‘Ready for Development’ to ‘In Development’, for example the co-assignee, the Assignee user won’t see the issue in his dashboard as ‘Ready for Development’ anymore.

Also there is a problem when the issue is being finished. If one of them completes their part of the issue first, how can I get the other to mark the issue as done before it can be transitioned to the final state?

Pavol Gočal_66ch29 · Accepted Answer

Hello @Peter Baran

maybe other members of the community will challenge me for my answer, but I do not think that the way you have set up the workflow is correct.

One of the goals for software development life cycle (from developer, PM or any other given role's point of view) is to have explicit status of all the issues in a given time. So that you know what has been done, what is currently being working on and what is in the backlog for future. With your set up, this is not fulfilled as 1 issue have multiple assignees, that change status according to their needs.

Having multiple people from different departments working on a single issue (maybe better let's call it a user story, or an epic) is a standard situation. But in this case, you should not have them working on a single issue in JIRA project. Why? Because the reason you mentioned - if one developer change the status, the other developer is affected.

I would suggest you think about changing the structure for your issues for this situation. For example:

Create an epic and link tasks to it. Assign the tasks to different developers. That way, you can see the status of every task at any given time. And also developers have their own work in their hands. When one developer finish his work, he marks his assigned task as done and you can see that. You will also see that another developer is still working on his assigned task.

Hope this helps.