Prevent a work item from being assigned if in a certain column

Question

Hi,

What is the best way to prevent a work item from being assigned if in a certain column.

Ex....

Work Item is assigned to Tom in the developer column, but Tom forgets to move the story over to the Testing team and leaves it in the developer column.  But he assigns the work item over to George.  The Project Manager looks quick and thinks it is still with development.

John Funk · Accepted Answer

Hi Harry,

The quickest and easiest way is to remove the permissions for the user to Assign work items in the Permission Scheme.

Trudy P Claspill · Accepted Answer

Hello @Harry

What type of Space does this concern? You can get that information by clicking the ... button next to the Space name in the panel on the left. What do the last two lines in the pop-up say?

There are a few methods for blocking changes to the Assignee field.

One is, as @John Funk mentioned, revoke a user's permission to Assign Issue through the project permissions. However, that would affect the user's ability to change the issue assignee at all times for all work items in all Spaces where those permissions are applied. It would not matter which column the work item was in.

If you want to be more selective in managing who can change the Assignee of an item based on the Status of the item you can use Workflow Properties. Refer to this document:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/use-workflow-properties/

That does require that you have sufficient permission to modify the Workflow used by the Space.

I'm not sure that will actually work for your case though. If I understand your case you want to prevent the Assignee from changing the Assignee, but only when the item is in a status that is the responsibility of the Assignee.

I would have to spend some more time thinking about how that could be done. There are two permissions that might be useful in workflow properties; assign and assignable. I don't think that assign would work in this case because it would be difficult to figure out if the Status correlated to the current Assignee's area of responsibility. The assignable permission might work, but you would have to establish the user who should not be able to be assigned to an item based on its status.

Another possible solution is that you create a Transition Screen and add the Assignee field to it. Remove the Assignee field from the View/Edit screens for the Space/Work Item Types. Then the Assignee field can be edited only when a Transition occurs. You might also look at ways to validate that the Assignee is actually changed as part of the transition.

The ability to add a Transition screen currently is available only for Company-managed types of Spaces, so if you are working with a Team-managed space this won't be an option.