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how to find the user assigned to a particular workflow status?

Bruce Lund

Hi,

We utilise a workflow that transitions tickets between team members from 'To Do' through various states to 'Closed'. Therefore the assignee at the end of the workflow probably wasn't the person who did the development work.

I have a need to reconstruct who did the dev work on what Issues.

How can I do this?

Accepted answers

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

You don't "assign a user to a status". The assignee is "the person currently owning the issue", which may involve all, some, or none of the work done on it while the issue is in any chosen status. You've got an issue that:

Moves through a workflow
May be assigned to many people during its (active) lifecycle.

These are technically and logically independent of each other - I can be the assignee of an issue, do no work on it ever, and yet still have it fixed because someone else deals with it.

To work out who did what during the life of the issue, look at the history. That can tell you who was the assignee at any time. For something more structured (and independent of the status), enable time-tracking and look at who logged time on the issue.

All comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Moves through a workflow
May be assigned to many people during its (active) lifecycle.

These are technically and logically independent of each other - I can be the assignee of an issue, do no work on it ever, and yet still have it fixed because someone else deals with it.

Bruce Lund

Nic.. I understand "you don't assign a user to a status". My point is that along with each issue moving through various workflow states, our issues also change hands - so the "Assignee" changes. Because of this I can't use 'Assignee' to tell me who the developer was. But we do generally only have one developer who does the development work on each issue - so the Developer will be the 'Assignee' at the time the workflow was in 'In Progress' status.

I can manually go through each Issue and pull this out of history but, as I said, I want to reconstruct who was the Developer on each ticket on our project which consists of over 600 tickets. I wouldn't post to this board if it was a simple matter of inspecting each ticket through the JIRA UI.

Ideally I could build a query straight into the JIRA DB to do this.. or similar. Just not sure how. It may be that someone else has already dealt with this issue or something similar.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Ok, it's just that you phrased the question in a way that suggested that you were unclear on "assign a user to a status" The rest of your question and response shows that you've run into exactly the same problem lots of us have hit - weak reporting in Jira. It's not really possible to say "who was assigned to that issue at time X" en-masse.. You can *Search* for it with something like "assignee was dave before 29/01/2015", but you can't easily report on it. And there's no tie-in with the status at all because you can easily change assignee or status completely independently. If you want to hit the database for it, you'll need to reconstruct two timelines for each issue, one for status and one for assignee and then merge them. I'm not a DBA, I don't know how you could construct SQL to do that, but I do know where to look - changeitem records all issue changes (so you'll see status from/to pairs and the same for assignee), and changegroup is a container for each change, with the time, issue and change author.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]

You can also try the following query:

status changed from "In Development" to "Ready for Testing" by bruce

Use it along with other AND/OR, before/after constructs and see if it helps.

Bruce Lund

Jobin.. this gets a result but the value of Assignee is still set to value it had at the close of the ticket. Need to find the assignee at the time it was "In Development". Still stuck.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]

You can get that only if you store the old assignee in a custom field. For example, you can have a field called "Developer" and store the assignee in that field during a workflow transition.

Bruce Lund

Yep.. I figured as much. Will implement an action on the workflow transition into 'In Development' for tickets going forward. Doesn't fix my historical issue though, sadly.