"pausing" a ticket- not actively working on a ticket

[Darren Weaver]

Like many companies, ours is no different; we have a ticket queue from which developers can take and complete a ticket.  Sometimes, however, the developer has a question that needs answering.  Essentially, we would need a method by which we could "pause" an issue or put it "on hold".  My company will not pay for any additional plugins/addons, however, we do have scriptrunner and a few others that makes workflow creation and editing very smooth.

What is the best practice for putting an issue on hold.  I would think it would work similar to the following:

create issue-->developer pulls ticket--> developer either cannot continue without having a question answered or he is pulled off of his existing ticket for an emergency--> developer transitions ticket to "on hold" status.  Reports can then be run by that status. 

Is there a better method?

[Warren]

Hi Darren

A simple way that we use is to "flag" it. In either the Backlog or an active Scrum / Kanban board, you can right click over the issue and there's an option to Add flag. This is just a toggle, so doing it again will remove the "flag".

But by adding the flag, you get visual knowledge of it (it shades the background of the card light yellow and adds a small red icon), plus when adding the flag you can add a comment. We always try to add a comment, so that anyone else can check why the flag has been added. In addition, you can report on all issues that have the flag.

[Thomas Heidenreich]

As the flag highlights the issue instead of sending it to the background I would rather use a label for that.

But generally we design the workflow with a "hold" status and ask for a date (required) and user (optional) during the transition there. When the date is reached the issue will be moved to open and assigned to the selected user (if one was selected).