How does an submitter of an issue figure out that someone is waiting for him to comment on issue ?

Question

Hi,

I would like to hear how others solve this issue in JIRA.

Let us assume the submitter has added an issue. The lead or somebody else get's an notification email of the new issue then he makes an comment to get more information. The submitter get's notified but looses the email. How can the submitter find the issue(s) where there are comments where they suppose to comment ?

Do you use the assign and then assign the issue to the submitter or do you do something else ?

donnib

Dave Donnelly [Sensata] · Answer

I see what you mean. I my case it might cause a lot of emails to get generated which is usually the chief complaint of my users.

Our workflow currently works of a: create->investigate->fix->verify->review cycle with different people involved at each stage. The questions are usually related only to one of the stages and it probably would not be advantageous to bump the whole issue back to the start of it's life cycle.

That being said, I have the workflow set up so that the assignee can move it back a stage, however that is not very often necessary.

JIRA Autobot · Answer

Hmm, i understand.

We are using another system in our company where we have made different stages on a issue here beeing : Sumbit -> Analyze -> Solve -> Validate

After validate we can close the issue, well you can actually close from any stage but that does not matter.

I see the best way to do this is to maybe add some more stages just as i have described above and when you need answers you kick back the issue to the submit stage meaning the submitter get's notified and later can filter on issues where they are in Submit stage.

Any ideas on this ?

Dave Donnelly [Sensata] · Answer

We do this two ways in my organisation:

1. Assign the issue to the person who should answer the question. It goes into their open issues and they are time tracked against their response. After reponse they assign it back to the questioner. This method has the disadvantage the re-assigning of the issue removes it from the original assignee's to do list and the issue can in fact get lost.

2. To combat losing issues assigned over for questions to be answered we have an issue type called "Question for Discussion" that we can create and link as a blocker to the original issue.  This proves to be much more efficient and there is no chance of original issue getting lost. If the question is not responding to within a defined length of time then we simply re-assign it to their team leader who usually gets it answered very quickly.

Our issue type "Question for discussion" has a very simple Open -> Closed workflow and has proved to be a very useful tool in expediting issue resolution. The only problem is the manual step of linking it to the initial issue. I would love a plugin that gave me an "ask a question" link that created it automatically....? Possible JIRA future feature?

Hope you get something that suits you.