Assign a task to multiple assignees

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 25, 2016

In an ideal world, you work together well on things and you know who is ultimately responsible for an issue.  In a lot of places that works fine, and people mostly ignore the assignee field because it's not important, because they know that the team is working together.  There's no point in worrying about the field in those cases, and multiple assignees adds nothing to it.

But, if that breaks down (and I totally agree with you that in large teams or organisations, it's easier for a break down to happen), then you still end up with "I thought Jim was doing it".  It's a bad thing when it happens, it's definitely frowned upon, so why not prevent it by having a single assignee?

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 25, 2016

It's not really them trying to be the law, they've chosen not to implement something in their software.  There are several ways of adding associated or interested people or groups, but the principle of a single user being the responsible party is the important one, and one that no-one arguing for multiple assignees here has yet managed to deal with

You say something that gets to the crux of it again.

>Why hasn't this task moved at all? And having two people assigned to a task will not affect this at all.

In real life (i.e. the last 20 years in software) every time I've been to a place which allows many assignees, there's always been a problem with two or more people named as the owner saying "I though the other one was responsible".  Always.  My current project has this problem, and one of the gains they're getting from moving to JIRA is that they won't be able to argue the assignee.

In all the discussions above, not one useful solution has come out.  Lots of yelling "it works here" and "of course it works", but no-one has managed to solve that problem without essentially saying "we need a single assignee"

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 22, 2016

I can't imagine any scenario where it's of use to other team members while it's in-progress with a pair.

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motherg July 22, 2016

Actually I think it's you that's missed the point - it's useful to other team members. The JIRA Agile board is an information radiator to the rest of the team. Perhaps the best way to deal with it would be to have it as a switchable labs feature like Concurrent Sprints?

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Roberto Rocha Rodrigues June 2, 2016

 

You have the assignee as the single point of contact and responsibility
That scenario means you don't need multiple assignees

 

This is how you want to be or how you think it should work.

Could I (or others) have more than one point of contact and responsability? Because the way my company (or team) works is different the way you think it should be. You think people will have communication problems if there are two or more point of contact/responsible. Maybe not:

 

So you don't need two assignees because they're working well together
In real life, this isn't always the case though

 

It seems that you want to enforce this behavior because for you makes more sense or you never saw a dev process working good with more than one responsible, but it can work.  

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Jeremy Brooks June 1, 2016

Surely pair programming is a scenario "in real life" where you would benefit from having multiple assignees?

Also the point about 2 people thinking the other is working on a task breaking the process is just an indicator of poor communication between people, not a symptom of having multiple assignees on a single task.

There really is no point in arguing about this, people are clearly keen on this feature. I don't see the harm in giving users an additional option to choose from.

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Melanie of Ottawa May 27, 2016

From a QA perspective at least, it makes sense to have multiple users assigned to a task/issue depending on the project and size of the team. Even then though, for JIRA purposes, we have have the 'primary' assignee which translates as the lead tester of the task/issue, who will coordinate/work with the 'secondary' assignees (using a custom multi-user field), fellow testers helping them. And then we have the watchers field for those who would like to keep an eye on the issue/task, yet not part of it. For team leads and managers, it helps them keep track of who is individually doing what without needing to create a new task or sub-task for each one of them, allowing them to have better fancy metrics with larger teams.   

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David Blue April 11, 2016

Agile talks about 'shared responsibility'.  I note on my cards who is the task owner, as well as who is assisting that person to achieve the work.  In my real world, multiple assignees are working very well.  I hope JIRA can help me out here.

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Jeremy Brooks February 10, 2016

This question is asked so often that it makes me wonder why JIRA doesn't allow its user base the functionality to assign multiple assignees to a task. My personal use case is where my team wont always work as a group or pair or "user account" grouping because they will dynamically choose tasks depending on the sprint. We work in an agile way and to reduce things in progress we will often have more than 1 developer/tester/etc working on a single task or sub task. In fact this type of dynamic team work is encouraged in an agile team. None of the workarounds allow for this properly. I'm genuinely astonished that the good people at Atlassian haven't just enabled multiple assignees by now!

Don't tell your users what they need to do, let them choose how they want to do it!

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