Track multiple customer status in single issue.

Question

Hi,

We have 50+ customers in our company, and i wonder if we could track all customer in one JIRA ticket with same workflow shared, BUT showing different status for each customer.

Meaning, if we have single JIRA ticket for all customers that has the same issue. The issue may be "resolved" for one customer but "new" for another customer. So, my question is, is there any way to track different status for all customer with same workflow?

I thought of doing this:

* create a custom field for all 50+ customers and assign workflow status as a drop value in that field. This way, we can track status independently of all customers (sharing the same workflow).
* Create a separate screen for these customers, and add an option in view screen (new tab or something). so whenever user need to change the resolution for the customer, they can click on that "tab" (Not sure if its possible).

Can anyone please add some light in it? In case, if you have any better idea

if i add all 50 customers, then it would be a huge selection list on the edit screen (Which i thought would be too hard to manage)

Thanks for your support in advance.

Norman Abramovitz · Answer

The sub-task approach that Nic is recommending is the way to go.   You should include a hierarchical plugin to allow more than one level of sub-tasks.  I used this approach to have different workflows for documenters, QA, development and marketing and being able to report (customized code) the issue at the top level.

In your case, adding a new issue means adding a customer.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The short answer is "no".

A status reflects the current state of the issue.  That's an absolute thing, not relative, doesn't matter who is looking at it or from where, it's a plain absolute state.

I do understand why you'd need something a bit like this though,  The problem to my mind is that you have a need to track something other than the actual core issue and you've confounded that tracking into the main issue.  I think you've got batches of issues here - a core and then a load of separate activities as a result of that.

I can't see how "new for customer 1, but resolved for customer 2" makes a lot of sense internally - the issue is either resolved or it is not.  The case I can imagine is "we've fixed it, but only rolled out the fix to customers 1, 4, 6, 19 and 26".

For that case, I'd start by inserting another status - so "issue has been fixed" doesn't go to "fully resolved" directly, but goes through a "deploy to customer" status.  You can then log in the issue which customers have had the fix, and when they're all deployed, finally close it.

You could do that with a multi-select as you suggested, but I'd also be tempted to do it with sub-tasks - one per customer and a simple workflow like Reported -> Sent patch to customer ->  deployed/confirmed, and then only allow the parent to close when the subtasks are complete.  If you go that way, I'd think about scripting the creation of all the customer subtasks (and if you did that, you could simplify the subtask flow to just "not deployed / deployed"