Due date reminder emails

Nezabyte August 19, 2013

Is there a way to remind users about the following via e-mail?

- tickets being due within the next 24 hours

- overdue tickets

16 answers

1 accepted

20 votes
Answer accepted
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 19, 2013

There's two steps here - finding the issues to remind people about, and then actually telling them.

First step - define a filter. Your requirements are pretty much the filters you need already, probably need more like "unresolved and due date < +1d" and "unresolved and due date < now()"

Second, for each filter, you've got two off-the-shelf options immediately

1. Use a variation on "escalation" - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Jelly+Escalation

2. "Subscribe" people to the filter - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Receiving+Search+Results+via+Email

There are other things you can do, but they need plugins/code/thought, so have a look at those two first.

PatrickO November 26, 2013

This seems bit more complicated than it should be. There should simply be a checkbox or button for an issue that allows you to EASILY have deadline notifications setup. Please stop over complicating Jira.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 26, 2013

Mmm. The difficulty with saying "there shoud be a button" is it instantly leads to the question "What exactly should the button do?"

You need to add something to define what the interval is (7 days? 14 days?) Then something to define which field you're interested in (created? updated? due?). Then you need to think about reporting - how do I know what is over the deadline or behind it?

How do I get the flexibility of a filter into one button?

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Jędrzej Wolski February 10, 2014

The answer is: by a proper definition of a problem and its solution. Patric is right - there should be a simple interface for simple situations. You can still keep flexibility for some dark hour ;)

The most simple case is following:

I need:

- an e-mail notification sent to the task assignee

when:

- the task is close to the due date by defined amount of time and still is not resolved

how:

- I need an entry to define the amount of time that will trigger the reminder

- I need a checkbox to mark whether the current task shall have reminder turned on or off

- optionally it would be nice to have a possibility to include/exclude watchers from receiving this reminder

Perhaps it is not one button but it is also not much complicated...

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 10, 2014

And that's my point - you've just described one way to do it. That's pretty much useless for most of my users, they need something very different. Your "proper definition" is still lacking enough detail to implement, and its also unusable by most users.

It's not a case of defining the problem - that's clear. It's clearly defining a solution because the whole point here is that you need it *flexible* otherwise it's useless for most of the user base.

The "dark hour" you need flexibility for occurs at the north pole, in the winter solstice, and lasts for 99.99% of the day.

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PatrickO February 10, 2014

Nic,

Well, to be fair we weren't creating a spec for a developer. If that were the case I would have created mockups with functionality descriptions included, and maybe other details. I don't even know if Atlassian would care if we did create a spec, do their devs or product manager even read this?

Maybe what you're after is more complex and should be part of a different discussion? Not sure, but we are after something simple. I've wasted a lot of time rooting around Atlassian documention trying to get this work and frankly, it's just that, a waste of my time. I've used plenty of other project management platforms and other software where notifications are super simple and easy for users.

Case in point is the documentation, at least what I've found, doesn't explicitly state you can subscribe other individuals to filters. It says you can subscribe groups of people. I don't want to bombard a group of people with reminders about other people's tasks, only the assignee should get one.

Patrick

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 10, 2014

And, again, that's the point - you're asking for a fixed system that only works for a handful of people, and hence is pretty much pointless for a generalised system with a wide range of users.

And, yes, Atlassian do read things here, but it's very rare that they pick up any specifications from here (I think I've seen it once, when a user described an improvement that WAS generalised and would work well for a huge swathe of use cases).

It is well worth raising it though - you will get a response of "duplicate/part of", "not going to do becasue...." quite quickly, or, if it stays open, then it's not ruled out. See jira.atlassian.com. But if you do raise it, remember it needs to be at least as flexible as the jelly/subscription stuff. (The escalation and subscriptions don't have a friendly interface, but they work, and there are far more useful things Atlassian have on the to-do list)

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Stephen Hayden
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February 11, 2014

This is a pretty straightforward need with a fairly straighforward solution as described in the accepted answer. Not sure I see the issue leading to this debate, projecting some frustration onto a simple problem it seems?

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 11, 2014

Same here - I understand why "a simple interface for a simple case" sounds desirable, but that's the whole point - once you start to try to define "a simple case", you instantly make it pretty much useless to almost all the user-base. As there's a flexible workaround that can be adapted for most cases, there's no point chasing up any "simple case"

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prancingblue October 16, 2016

Just stumbled upon this thread from Google when searching for JIRA reminders, sorry for the Necro. I created a task to discuss and spec out a project with someone. They're gone next week. I'd like an email on Monday when they return to address this task.

I understand that there are a lot of complex things that could be done, but the simple tool seems like it could be useful for everyone. "Add Reminder" -> "Date & Time" -> "Assignee | Reporter | Watchers"

That's it. At the designated time, an email will be sent to the selected users.

This could be utilized for other situations, such as the deadline, or the supervisor followup. But, not designed around that specific need.

Your escalation link is broken, and the filter subscribe may be what I use, but it is a bit too broad I think. I'll get the "useless helpful" emails every day (or defined interval) and stop looking at them. I think automatic reminders will be ignored, I think periodic reminders will be ignored. But, if there are a very small subset of user desired reminders, there will be few enough, that they're useful and relevant.

In other words, if there are 2 tasks I want to be reminded about Wednesday, one task I want to be reminded on at the end of next month, and one task I want to be reminded on a week from Monday, and I explicitly set these reminders, it won't be filtered into a bin and forgotten because they're action items that the user wanted.

Sounds like you've already made up your mind though, that's fine. =) I disagree.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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October 16, 2016

The escalation link is broken because the conversation is so old.

The interface has also been changed.  It's nothing like the so-called "simple" solution I was arguing against of course, because that's simply not useful for most users.  It's now a subscription by effectively "cron".

prancingblue October 16, 2016

Right, so my current solution is to set the due date to the date I want to be reminded of the task. I.E. although the project is not due next monday, I set the due date to next monday, so then at 5:30am I have a filter subscription. The filter is for any task assigned to me (current user) with a due date between 0 and 1d. With the subscription set to daily at 5:30am.

This will effectively remind me on the day-of the due dates, which will roughly work.

Yes, this is an old conversation, but it is the first result in google when I search for, "jira reminder emails" so it is worth keeping the answer relevant for incoming googlers.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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October 16, 2016

I was only discussing how to deprecate or keep updated answers on Answers with Atlassian a couple of days back.  We're working on it wink

18 votes
Tomás Gutiérrez September 18, 2017

Thanks to @Nic for pointing me in the right direction. The solution that worked in one setup, using Jira Cloud, was the following:

  • Create two filters:
    • "My issues that are due soon" --> `assignee = currentUser() AND resolution = Unresolved AND duedate > now() AND duedate < 2d ORDER BY duedate ASC, updated DESC`
    • "My overdue and unresolved issues" --> `assignee = currentUser() AND resolution = Unresolved AND duedate < now() ORDER BY duedate ASC, updated DESC`
  • Go to each filter, and create a subscription per https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver073/working-with-search-results-861257284.html

Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 12.38.26 PM.png

Craig Silver April 13, 2020

It's because of these (helpful) posts that this forum needs a permalink feature so that one can bookmark it forever and refer right back to it.

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8 votes
Jason Wehling May 30, 2014

I have to agree with most of the opinions in this thread: why is there not a simple reminder system for tickets with due dates. Nic is arguing for development specifics, but all reminder apps are pretty much the same: add an alert with a relative period from the due date. iCal, et al — it's all the same approach.

Instead, I'm having to manually add reminders to the Apple Reminder app so I am notified on my phone, and that's just silly; I shouldn't have to do this.

Randall Robertson
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June 21, 2014

I find the filter subscription to be a great way to do this. You set it once and it works for every issue that meets your criteria without you having to do any more work. I would be annoyed if I had to set a reminder on each issue I wanted a reminder for.

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Admin Istrator October 15, 2014

Randall hit the nail on the head, "I would be annoyed if I had to set a reminder on each issue I wanted a reminder for." The filters allow you to set generalized reminders for all issues matching the filter criteria. It may even be possible to set multiple filters for different reminder times based on some custom fields. Those of us who use JIRA for tracking several tickets / issues at a time cannot be spending the extra cycles to manage a notification for each ticket that gets created.

3 votes
Julie King June 4, 2019

I know this thread is old... I found it trying to do pretty much exactly what Jason wants to do and was very disappointed to discover this is mostly a long discussion of the solution I'm looking for, but the actual solution does not exist.

Not having the feature available as Jason described above is ridiculous. My team do not want to use filter logic / subscriptions to get notifications. They want - they need - to be able to talk to a client and then set a specific follow-up / reminder date based on instructions we receive from our clients without having to fiddle around with due dates to cheat the system.

If you don't need that and the filters work for you - great! But if you do need this feature, as Jason did and I'm sure many others like us do as well, then the fact that a broad, clumsy option exists does not excuse JIRA for not also having a more targeted, flexible option as well.

This is one of the reasons we are actively looking for other solutions right now... for as flexible and powerful as JIRA is, it has a huge blind spots like this one.

There absolutely should be a way to have some -- but not all issues with due dates -- have custom reminders... like when the client tells you "I'll get that to you next Wed" or you send a task for a client to validate before invoicing... you should be able to click "schedule reminder" and then fill out a simple form identifying who, what, when and how often.

It's not hard to tell how this feature could and probably should work - just look at the Issue Reminder plugin that is only available for the server version of JIRA. 

Another related problem in this is that JIRA's current notification system is so verbose that pretty much everyone on the team deletes them all, automatically, making them utterly useless.

Having a "remind me" option on issues that can be set on-the-fly is an entry level feature in any project or task management tool.

I cannot believe I may now have to pay extra for a plugin or convert from cloud to server just to get a feature that should have been a core feature feature for many years already now. 

3 votes
Ernie Hartman May 29, 2019

The pig-headedness in this thread is mind blowing. Just because you don't think something is useful doesn't mean other people do. Many people here are asking for something quite simple: A check box or Issue Field that allows you to be reminded  via email on a specified date. Very simple...

For anyone else looking for this, I created a filer with the following parameters: User = Current User, Resolution = Unresolved, Due Date = Due in next 1 day or overdue. I then subscribed myself to this filter so I get emails.

It took me 20 minutes to do something that should be built into JIRA.

3 votes
Lukas Hummer February 14, 2019

Hi,

so i too wanted to set a Reminder for some of our Projects to only certain People.

This is a crazy long topic here but there is no real step-by-step instruction.

This whole filter thing is actually pretty easy, it just takes some time.

Also, i´ve added a custom field called "Reminder date" so you can have a Due date and a seperate Reminder date.

 

Setting up a custom Date picker field:

Jira Dashboard/Jira Settings/Issues/Custom fields/Add custom Field/choose date picker--name and describe it.

Check the Screens you want it to apply (actually i think this is not necessary, not sure).

To show this field on your create Task screen you have to go to screens and then your project screen on configure.

At the bottom "select field" type in your new field name e.g."reminder date" and drag it to your desired position.

No need to save.

 

Setting up a filter:

your project/Issues and filters/earch Issues

Choose your desired projects/type/status/assigne

then more/"reminder date" and Resolution/unresolved

now in range 0d to 1d ant on the top save as..Name it

you can use more fields if you like to.

 

Then view all filters/three dots/manage subscriptions/add subscription leave it as personal subscription or for teams as you wish.

Daily/once per day/ and then the Time at wich you want to get the reminder..i choose 7am

don´t check the box below.

 

Now you will get an email every time at 7 am if there is an unresolved Task, with you as assignee oder reporter or whatever you did choose, with it´s reminder date for this day or the next one.

If you want to apply this reminder to more Projects you just have to set the new field also on other project screens and define your filter for more projects.

I hope this helps.

3 votes
Jason Wehling July 8, 2014

Nic: maybe not all do, but clearly there are many Jira customers that use it as a task management system. My company does. And tasks have due dates. And due dates pass by. Which is why reminders are nearly universal across task management applications.

Additionally, the approach used is also very common — from Sales Force to Apple iCalendary to AtTask. I don't think the "we need a spec" arguement, nor the "if it's simple it won't work for most people" arguments are very convincing. There's already a well defined approach to follow: look at Apple iCalendar. It's simple, and very effective. And it works for everyone that wants to set reminders.

Just saying... I agree with others that this is a legitimate request and I'd like to lend my vote for this as well.

The issue with the filter subscription approach (which has been recommended) is that it relies on the assigee to set up reminders for themselves. As a Manager, how can I enforce reminders?Or at least set them up for my team. I don't think I can. Can I?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 8, 2014

I still think you've missed the point. Your idea of a reminder is still probably not mine. The approach used is very common, yes, and all I hear about reminders from all sorts of systems is the complaint that a) they don't work or b) they're not flexible enough. In all those cases, reminders quicky become useless because people learn to recognise and ignore them, or they work around them (email rule to bin them. That's what I do with allegedly "helpful" reminders)

The "if it's simple" argument remain valid. Define it. When you say "Look at Apple iCalendar", you're agreeing with me - as the recipient of one of those reminders, I set it up the way I want it. Not to some rule imposed on me.

As for "as a manager, I want to remind my employees", I really do understand it as I am someone who relies on other people to do work. And as an employee, I desperately want you to stop nagging me when I don't need it - it's disruptive and counterproductive. I'm afraid I need to circle back to "we need a spec" - that spec needs to include the way the people get the reminders work, and that means doing it for themselves, and being flexible enough to accomodate that.

3 votes
tom t May 9, 2014

i also need a simple reminder for task. click a button, set a date, get an email with reminder that's it simple. don't wnat to filter etc, simple reminder.

1 vote
Edward Crompton September 3, 2019

If anyone has ever used Google calendar to create an event, then the answer for how to do it right is there - Jira should have this as a built-in simple option.

Then in addition - for more complex scenarios we can use the Filter & Subscribe features.

1 vote
Randall Robertson
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August 1, 2018

@Ed Hayes III, yes, they are personal messages, not a group one. It runs the filter separately for each person in the group, so using assignee = currentUser() in the filter means it only notifies the user of his/her assigned items, not the whole group's list.

1 vote
John Corwith February 16, 2017

This is an old thread but I just (2/2017) started looking for a solution to a similar problem.

The filter and subscribe solution is a kludge at best. We really just want to be able to send a reminder to anyone who gets assigned to a ticket based on upcoming due date, not state changes. With this solution, the assignee either has to subscribe themselves or be part of a subscription group. Just doing "everyone" for an org such as ours would probably grind the system to a halt. We have lots of instances where a number of people will only be assigned a couple times a year. Also the person is going to get the periodic reminder from the date they are assigned till it is due. These sorts of emails have a tendency to get filtered out as noise.

The best solution I can find is a relatively inexpensive plugin which has been around a long time which is probably why Atlassian doesn't have simple reminders as core functionality. Absorbing plugins discourages outside plugin development.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.riadalabs.jira.plugins.notificationassistant/server/overview

Alex Ober May 4, 2017

And of course, this plugin only works for Jira Server and I'm working with Jira Cloud. :(

I am also trying to do something like this - send a single reminder based on the due date of a ticket, not based on SLA metric, as a universal rule (affects all users, not just me) and it seems either impossible or needlessly complicated.

...maybe I can create a queue specifically for tickets that are within a certain amount of time of their due date? Everything else I tried, like automation rules, depend on SLA metrics, which I don't want to use. I may be stuck with the filter...

JiraYo
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February 28, 2019

notification assistant does work for this. its a paid plugin sadly.

I wanted to send a basic reminder email when a duedate comes up, one day after. This plugin has a great scheduling and frequency system.

The place where it really falls down is that i cant input any variables into the email, just templates with issue fields (which is OK), but i cant say Dear <USERNAME> because it wont let me add those fields to the email body like other jira email templates can. Forces you to add any variables at the very bottom which is meh. The wisiwig editor is also very limited, just giving you basic font sizes (h1-h6 type thing). Kind of like these comment boxes...

 

I couldn't use filters and subscriptions because for us, the user will be different every time. This is basically a form that people can make a request and then have it occur at a due date that they then need to be aware of to add additional information. So i set it to duedate = -1d using JQL and the plugin checks every day and sends an email at 7am to anyone whoes due date was yesterday. It simply sends them a reminder to fill out their paperwork.

example code below for the jql so you get an idea.

due = -1d AND issuetype = "Request" AND status not in (Closed, Done, Resolved, Canceled)

 

oblig: "this should be a built in feature of notifications obviously", to send them at a specific time based on JQL lookups. oh well, plugin works OK at it and its implemented for my staff now thus solving the issue.

0 votes
Mike Boehm May 31, 2018

OK, so this thread is 5 years old and crazy long.  I'm also looking for something that will email any assignee of a ticket that belongs to a certain project any time they have a Past Due ticket.

Is there's a step-by-step answer buried in this thread somewhere that I can follow?

If I have a ticket that was due yesterday, I want to get an email reminding me to close it or change the due date.  And I want to basically force this on my team without them having to manually go subscribe to something.

Can that be done?  Maybe I missed it in all the arguing in this thread but I finally just scrolled to the end...

Thanks!

Ed Hayes III May 31, 2018

As far as I can tell, everyone is going to have to set up their own list and subscribe to it.

John Corwith June 1, 2018

+1 on what Ed said. What seems like a basic function is not supported by Jira and a number of people agree with Atlassian's position on this. There are 1 or more plug-ins available so people obviously want the functionality. They would just rather not have to pay extra for what seems like a basic function. Issue Reminders was the one I was looking at.

Randall Robertson
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August 1, 2018

@John Corwith and @Ed Hayes III  - in case you haven't found an answer yet, I'll mention that you can subscribe a group to a filter. So, perhaps you can set up a filter like this:

assignee = currentUser() AND resolution is empty AND duedate < startOfDay() 

and then subscribe your team's jira group to the subscription. If you set it not to notify when the filter results are empty, it will only notify each person in the group who has one or more unresolved issues that are overdue. I just tried it and it worked as described.

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Ed Hayes III August 1, 2018

@Randall Robertson Yes, I've been using something like that for a while. Still quite a hack way around something that should be automatic.

So subscribing the group will cause individual messages to go out? Not just one common/identical one sent to the whole group?

Prath Santhiran August 28, 2018

@Randall Robertson, thank you!!!! what beautiful thing "assignee = currentUser()" is. I just tested some issues with subscriptions pointing to a group and sure enough, only those assignees with issues that satisfied the criteria received the email.

Wow, I really did get worked up reading all comments from 2014. Time for a breather. 

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Randall Robertson
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August 29, 2018

Thanks for adding your verification, @Prath Santhiran. Glad it is helping you.

0 votes
Ed Hayes III April 9, 2018

I'll chime in too... +1 for having reminders. If there's a due date field, there should be a concept of a reminder. It's silly that there is even debate about this.

Teamwork.com and basecamp send emails by default; it's strange Jira doesn't even have the capacity to set up a simple reminder.

Example: outlook and calendar events. User's can set a default reminder that's used every time a new event is created, but they have the option to change that reminder. 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

It does have reminders.  It just needs you to define ones that work for you.  Have another read of the conversations above and you'll see why it doesn't do "one size fits all" (because it's broadly useless), and your various options for getting them working well for you.

Ed Hayes III April 9, 2018

I read them before posting.  It's for sure one size fits many. 

I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people who have went through the trouble of creating a custom filter and subscribing to it, have one equivalent to this:

assignee = currentUser() AND status != Done AND duedate < startOfDay(2d) ORDER BY duedate ASC

It took me 20 minutes to do something that most competing applications/services do by default.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

But start of day (2d) is useless to me in some projects.  One size fails miserably to work for everyone.  Even my PM and Consultants need different reminders to me, and we're all working on the same things in the same projects.

If you had read the postings properly, you'd have seen the one that says "The difficulty with the previous conversation is that it mostly seems to be people asking for a "simple" way to do this, and then not being able to define a simple case that works for more than a tiny handful of users."  That remains true.

Ed Hayes III April 9, 2018

If software features were limited to features that fit EVERYONE, there would never be anything created. 

Simple Reminders
Global/Site Setting:
 [Enable/disable] [notification type] sent [days] before [datetype]
User setting: Based on global setting
Jira Task setting: Based on assigned User Setting

My setting would be: [Enable] [Email] sent [2 days] before [due date]

All other situations could be covered with existing features. People who would get annoyed at reminders, could disable theirs. 

Nic, you appear to be the only one really against this, maybe 2 others who are not as passionate about you. And the other 10 or 15 people who took the time to comment here, all want this.

One Stackoverflow page "Jira issue reminder" has been viewed 8,484 times
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11490566/jira-issue-reminder

This is not something that "few" people want. 

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

I think you are completely missing the point.  A tiny handful of people want something that saves them having to think about setting up a system that already does what they want if they put a bit of thought into it.   There's no need for it from the majority of people (there's a lot more than 8,484 people who have not looked for it.  Heck, I worked at a place with 120,000 active users who didn't want it).  There are more important and useful things Atlassian could be adding than a default that most people won't find useful.

Ed Hayes III April 9, 2018

I am not missing the point you are trying to make. I understand you don't want it. And I understand many people would not want it. However, you are assuming most people don't want the feature. Did you actually ask all 120,000 people "do you want this feature?" Did you get a response of "no?" I highly doubt there is even a single organization that has 120,000 active Jira users. Microsoft (One of the largest software companies) has 124,000 employees (2016). I doubt they use Jira, and even if they did, I doubt 97% of their employees would be coders/supervisors/management that would use Jira. 

But for argument's sake, lets assume what you are saying is true. With the solution I am suggesting, it would take 1 person 1 minute to disable notifications for all 120,000 users, by default.

The reason I point to Stackoverflow is that page proves there is some level of interest in the feature. More than just a handful of people. Thousands of people sought out a solution. 

Just because you would not use the feature, it doesn't mean it would be extremely valuable to other users. Why fight so hard for something that you don't want? If you don't want it, don't use it.

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John Corwith April 9, 2018

We've been told we have one of the largest single instances of JIRA in the world. We have infrequent users that don't typically have JIRA open in their browser and need an email  reminder. Our admins are too busy trying to resolve other issues with JIRA and confluence and don't have time to run reports and email out reminders.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

Why would I ask?  There's thousands of things far more useful to them, and most of them have happily set up the reminders they need for themselves, most of which are far more useful than the arbitrary fixed reminder that suits a tiny handful of them (or, for the infrequent users, asked someone to set it up for them)

I don't need to point at a few users who have actively looked, especially as most of them are perfectly happy with "It does do it, I just have to set it up, instead of hope that someone has defaulted one that happens to suit me".

>I highly doubt there is even a single organization that has 120,000 active Jira users

I can point at 5 my squad has worked with over the last 3 years. 

But that's not my point.  I'm not sure what you're reading, but you've not grasped the stuff above.  I can't explain it again.

Ed Hayes III April 9, 2018

Lets assume half of that 120,000 organization wants to have at least 1 reminder email that fits within my example. Let's also assume, like me, it took 10 minutes to hunt for a solution on how to create the reminder, and implement the solution. Lets then assume these folks get paid $60 an hour. That's a total cost of $600,000 ((120,000/2) * 10 min * ($60/60)) to set up a single common notification.

Just because there is an existing complex way of setting up simple or complex notification doesn't mean a simple additional way would be high valuable to many people.

Why would you ask if they want notifications? Because you really shouldn't assume what people want.  

You can't say many people don't want it. That is an invalid argument. You can't talk for anyone other than yourself.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

I think your numbers are poor assumptions.  A more reasonable assumption is that 0.02% want a reminder email like yours, and maybe 1% want email reminders at all, and in my experience, 95% want Jira to stop (or have learned to ignore it)

>Why would you ask if they want notifications?

What about the other hundred and eleventy twelve things people want?  Especially the other things they want more?  I don't have time to do any fixing if I have to go around asking people closed questions.  As an admin, I ask open ones - not "do you want X", but "what kind of things do you want?".  That gives you a list, and "arbitrarily preset notifications that are useless for most of us" is never on it. 

That said, there is a "reminder service" suggestion open with Atlassian and they have not closed it "won't fix".  It's had a grand total of 30 votes since 2003.  Compare that with "reduce email chattiness", of a similar age and nearly 1,300 votes (the list is 4,500 items long, I don't have time to ask users 4,500 questions)

Adam Dutton April 9, 2018

Just quit arguing with this guy. He's not going to change his mind if he just keeps making the same assertions over and over that it's a useless feature. If I was atlassian, I'd be horrified there was some customer running around my message board telling people their feedback was something no one wanted.

 

Turning off my notifications. I can't believe this is still just you going around and around with people about how no one wants what you don't want; it's been almost 4 years since you scolded me off this subject and I'm still getting pop up about your posts.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 9, 2018

I'm assuming that was aimed at me.  It's not a case of "I don't want", it's a case of "there is no evidence that the majority wants this".  I'll take the assertions point, but I would point out that my assertions are backed with evidence and experience.  Have a look at the queue of issues open with Atlassian, including all the ones saying "less email please", if nothing else.

It's a lie to say I'm "telling people their feedback was something no-one wanted".  I'm asking that feedback is considered and useful.  Show evidence, don't just assume that because you want something, everyone else does.  By all means, ask, especially if things might have changed, but instead of just yelling "I want", and inventing numbers, read and understand the existing arguments against it, and counter them.

The evidence here is not "should not do this", but that it's probably never going to become worth doing, given the other things people do want a lot more, and the effort involved given that people want less email, more modern ways of collaborating and reporting, and can set it up if they need it.

Jason Wehling April 9, 2018

I had not idea I could vote. Where can I vote for this feature?

I too am surprised JIRA doesn't have a simple reminder system. And I agree that the recommended way to solve this problem by using saved search notification is incredibly complicated, including the fact that it's on a user-by-user basis only (which simply doesn't scale as each user has to manually add this for it to work organization-wide). It's not clear to me why there's a due date attribute on a ticket without this basic function.

I'm frankly surprised how flippant Atlassian has been about this issue. Years earlier, it was argued that this function doesn't have a straight-forward implementation, which I believe is demonstrably false: nearly all apps that have due dates have almost the exact same reminder function outline in this thread. I don't see any ambiguity here. And when this was pointed out, now there's a secondary argument: well, we simply have better things to built. I'm sure that's true — and I think it's easy to say that most JIRA users are also building software products — so we're familiar with how decisions like this are made. But I would ask for a respectful tone as clearly there is a desire (however small) for having a robust reminder function in JIRA. In fact, I for one would like to vote for this.

Thank you for listening.

Ovidiu Vasilescu April 10, 2018

This whole topic is hilarious. It's like most people have never used jira.

 

How it usually goes:

A: How can I do x?

B: You can't, you need to either script it yourself or buy this expensive plugin.

A: Ah, ok.

 

How this ticket is going:

A: How can I do x?

B: Like this.

A: I don't like the way I'm doing that, it should be easier, Atlassian should spend time accommodating my needs.

Ed Hayes III April 10, 2018

Nic, can you please share the URL of the "reminder service" suggestion which is open with Atlassian? 

Thanks.

0 votes
Hung Nguyen September 21, 2016

Implementing what Nic suggested above (option 2) in real action, I think we can 

  1. Create a filter that find the issues with duedate matching a condition and assignee = currentUser(). 
  2. Save it and set permission to Everyone.
  3. On the Details of the filter, create a new subscription to send email to a predefined group, which contains all the possible assignees, scheduled at specific period

In such way, at that scheduled time, it will send out email to each assignee with the bug list due for him/herself if there is at least one.

 

0 votes
JamesT
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April 5, 2016
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 5, 2016

Well, not really, as those functions have been there mostly since version 3.

JamesT
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April 5, 2016

Oh, I see, you already referenced the JIRA 6.4 item in your post.  That does seem to solve the basic need for me, but I see it doesn't solve the need to subscribe others to such a notification, unless there's a way to subscribe others that I can't see.

0 votes
Adam Dutton July 8, 2014

It isn't just a handful of customers if Sales Force is offering it as a feature...

https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=activities_setting_reminders.htm&language=en_US

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 8, 2014

Er, Jira already DOES this.

The "handful of customers" refers to the small number of Jira users who want to remove the flexibility provided by Jira because they want it to be "more simple" (more simple = less flexible and hence useful to fewer customers)

Adam Dutton July 8, 2014

I don't think the issue is wheter it will do it, it's the amount of work to make JIRA do it for single cases and not a broad catagory through filters or, making many filters and subcribing people to them.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 8, 2014

Yes, I agree that the issue here is not about whether it does it or not, but about how to make it easy for all users. Which you can't because they all have different needs.

When someone asks for "the simple case", they mean "what works for me". Which is fine for them, but not going to work for the vast majority of other people (on a scale from "it's close" to "it's useless to me")

Adam Dutton July 8, 2014

I guess in the future I'll try the pluggin community with suggestions or comments since feedback seems unwanted here.

Like Ernie Hartman likes this
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 8, 2014

I'm sorry, I don't mean to discourage you from giving feedback - that's always welcome.

Please do continue with suggestions and comments, they are appreciated.

(I'm not sure what you mean by "plugin community" though, as Answers kind of is that already)

The difficulty with the previous conversation is that it mostly seems to be people asking for a "simple" way to do this, and then not being able to define a simple case that works for more than a tiny handful of users.

This conversation has helped me to understand how hard it can be for a "product owner" - even getting a simple solution that meets all the users needs can be a lot harder than it sounds when you start trying to define it. I've not seen anything that is particularly "wrong" here, just a lot of well-intentioned stuff that falls down when you try to question how it's going to work for anyone else.

Joe_Hardin October 5, 2016

The key to this debate is that last phrase "meets ALL users needs" - products rarely do that. The happy medium is meeting most users needs, which are clearly articulated in the thread above. Just because it doesn't work for your particular company's use case(s) doesn't mean that it doesn't fulfill the needs of the majority.  

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