Can we assign the story to two assignees

Question

We generally assign a story to a developer and once its goes in QA if we reassign it to the tester than the story points are deducted from developers data and gets added to tester data.

Is there a way that a story can be assigned to one developer and tester together in order to get the right stats

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

It's a better approach than multiple assignees - in the real world, that causes problems.  I've never seen anywhere that allows many assignees that has not had massive problems with "I thought someone else was doing it"

seo helpz · Answer

Jira doesn't allow you to assign task to multiple users neither allow you to add more watchers (out of the box). Still its call as the best project tracking tool .. huh.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

No.  Jira uses the assignee field to mean "This is the one single person currently responsible for the issue".  I'm told one of the reasons it was written was because of the problems caused by allowing multiple assignees - it is inevitable that there will be cases of "I thought someone else named was doing it".

However, the assignee is a time based thing, that's why I emphasised the "currently".  In general, there's an intention for an issue to be given to a developer, then when they finish, a tester, possibly some back and forth, and then closed, so the issue goes through a cycle of assignees.

There's also no harm in having many people owning or involved with an issue.  Add a group-picker so you know the group that owns it.  Or add fields to explicitly name the developer and tester (and others) for the whole lifetime.  You can even get a bit clever with those - a common trick is to copy the tester from the field into the assignee when the developer clicks "ready for testing"