Why can't we have multiple assignees on a ticket?

Mick C January 13, 2020

I'm asking this as a question and not a discussion because I want an answer.

Jira is a big complicated app and sometimes in a big corporation with many stakeholders it can be a tough sell.

What doesn't help is when there are arbitrary decisions made like "a task can only have one assignee". I've worked in multiple software companies and EVERYWHERE that I have used Jira the same problem is always floated.

"Why can't I assign two people to this ticket?"

When I explain that you just can't, and I don't know why then the eye-rolling ensues.

The amount of discussion around this one particular feature on this forum and on the internet as a whole is very indicative of the the fact that this is a hot topic.

So here's my own personal question:

Why is this arbitrarily locked down when the number of labels a ticket can have isn't? The number of child tasks that can be assigned isn't etc etc. Why does Atlassian force the law on this one particular feature but give maximum flexibility everywhere else?

Surely if in my organisation I see fit to assign a ticket to two people (or three or four) then I should be able to do that.

If you're one of the militant "one assignee per ticket" people then that's fine. You do you. Everyone else should have the choice.

50 answers

5 votes
Mick C January 13, 2020

Sorry @Lenin Raj but no - that's not a solution. It's a horrible, complex workaround involving the creating of email accounts (usually another department) creating new jira accounts (adds cost) and generally its a fuddled mess.

One day person X and person Y may be working together. The next week person Y might be working with Person Z. Are we supposed to go around that process each time? It's simply ridiculous.

The thing that REALLY gets me:

"it creates a problem with accountability" - You SHOULD NOT be defining or assuming how accountability works at every company in the world who chooses to use Jira. How my company tracks accountability is not Atlassian's problem.

So no - you have not solved this problem and given that you have acknowledged that it is the most asked for / most requested feature it's quite simply disgraceful that you haven't come up with a real solution.

2 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 14, 2020

Anecdotal. 

Over 25 years, I've yet to find anywhere that it works.  I've found lots of places that desperately needed to stop doing it, several Jira sites who (including, as I said, ones run by people who, in other threads here, thought it was a good idea until it blew up in their face - one of them had the decency to apologise in person and buy me a thank-you-for-unpicking-the-mess pint).

I am still waiting to see a decent answer to "what if the other person said they thought the other people were responsible".  Whilst that's not "evidence", it is a fact, and human nature pretty much guarantees that it is going to happen.

The fact it has prattled on for years is also human nature.  There's loads of things that prattle on for years with the people who are wrong just not getting it but being vocal about it - we still have astrology columns in newspapers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers - just because they're loud or common does not mean that they're right (or even that the opinion is valid - it's not an opinion when it's wrong).  I'm not saying there that "multiple assignees" is not a valid opinion - I'm picking exaggerated cases.  But multiple assignees does fail in the real world (with one exception, where it works fine, but has incredibly limited use and is fixed by adding a user-picker field to Jira)

2 votes
Jack Brickey
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January 13, 2020

I can’t answer for Atlassian at all here as I am just a user like yourself. That said I know there are a ton of request for product changes. Some I’m sure make sense and align with the product architecture and strategy and some I’m sure do not. I can’t say where this request would fall. I only know it isn’t something I would want/need but appreciate that others may. 

2 votes
John Funk
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January 13, 2020

I will weigh in that I think it's a really bad idea to have two people assigned to an issue. We treat the assignee as the owner of the issue and they are responsible until someone pulls the card from them and takes ownership. That's more of a Kanban best practice than anything. 

If you find you have multiple people working on a single issue at the same time, there's a good chance the issue hasn't been broken down to the smallest level it should be. 

Those are my two cents.  :-)

2 votes
Jack Brickey
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January 13, 2020

Hi @Mick C , you might want to consider sending in a suggestion via Atlassian support for this. The most important aspect would be to articulate the detailed requirements. Things to consider:

  • is two enough or should the implementation be “n” assignees?
  • notifications - is a single notification scheme sufficient for all assignees or would you require unique schemes for each?
  • reporting by Assignee - there are a lot of implications on how gadgets and reports work leveraging Assignee field. How would you want each to behave in the various reports/filters/gadgets?
  • Would you want a single Assignee field that can contain multiple users or would you want unique Assignee fields (e.g. Assignee, Assignee2, Assignee3...) that could be filtered on independently?

you might also wish to check at jira.atlassian.com and search for existing suggestions and if found vote/watch and add comments there.

Finally, and I’m sure you are already aware of this, you can always create a new “second Assignee” user picker custom field. However, it won’t behave like the Assignee field with any special rules. You could consider marrying the custom field with a scripting/automation addon to give you some of those behaviors.

2 votes
Mick C January 13, 2020

And this is absolutely fine :-)

Your opinion = great. However many many others have a differing opinion which is also fine. My point is exactly relating to what you've said; you do you.

However if you wish to be able to assign multiple assignees to a task then you should be able to.

2 votes
Merve Nur Bas
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January 13, 2020

In my opinion a ticket should have one assignee (=accountable person) at the same time. 

Surely a task can have different assignees overall. However, in my opinion the exact same task cannot be owned by multiple people at the same time. You are free to change assignees as the statuses or circumstances change.

Let's say you have got a ticket in order to create a login for some new employee. This can only be owned by a single person. It is just a single person task. In the second you give the opportunity to assign multiple users to that task, you also eliminate the accountability of the field. Also the assigned users will most likely just rely on the other assignees. 

As I said above, in my opinion it makes more sense to change the assignee as circumstances/statuses change OR just divide the task in multiple smaller tasks which again have got one assignee but actually realize one big task. Let's say you and your team have to create a documentation for your new application. On the first glance this is a single task but actually multiple people will contribute to it. So you should divide this task into what actually has to be done by the single team members. 

Well, this is my personal opinion. 
 

1 vote
Harry Chan February 5, 2020

@Mick C by this logic of those who don't think it should be "limited" in that way -- why are we limited to anything? 1 person should have multiple avatars? An issue can belong to multiple projects and multiple Epics. Let's just rip out all the rules right? How does having multiple assignees make sense? Unless no 1 is working. In what scenario does and can this happen? Just have a task that says "Do work" and add everyone in the team in? If so why use JIRA?

1 vote
Harry Chan February 5, 2020

@Viktor if 2 people are discussing how they are working together on an issue and documenting - doesn't that mean the issue itself can be broken down? What you describe is 2+ issues. Even if 2 people are editing an issue in real time they are doing different things.

@Mick C how does it work in your world? No 2 people can be doing the "same" thing at the "same" time? I'm curious about how that works. In reality it doesn't? If 2 people are assigned on a big task, then why not just break it down? If 2 people are assigned on a small task, why? I don't understand why you'd need 2 people to fetch the toilet paper for example. IF in the example that there are a lot of toilet paper and it requires 2 people then you are requesting 2 tasks, so there should be 2 and 1 each.

Even in some pair programming world the 2 aren't doing the same thing at the same time. 1 is mentoring, debugging, documenting or something else whilst 1 is coding. Unless they're both typing on the same keyboard etc.

1 vote
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 28, 2020

Yes, I've currently got two projects running away from Monday.com because of the mess made by multiple assignee.  Thank you for the evidence.

1 vote
Mick C January 20, 2020

Hi Jack, I didn't say anywhere that "how something works in one tool translates to another tool being wrong" - I really don't know how you managed to interpret anything like that.

I was asked by another Community Leader to show another tool that allows multiple assignees and that's all I did.

1 vote
John Funk
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January 15, 2020

@Mick C  - You keep throwing out that the comment that "Atlassian themselves have admitted this is there most requested feature", but I think you have confused a comment by another user that the question is one that particular user gets most often. Please do not confuse the two. Community Leaders are not Atlassian staff. We are users just like you trying to help other users. 

You work differently than the majority of us. We get that. But that doesn't mean that Atlassian should provide you with whatever you want. You have been given workarounds to accomplish what you want. That's not always available for lots of features that many of us would like to have. I am sorry that you don't like having to use workarounds. I get that, trust me. But at least you can do something. 

The Community here is not the place to try to brow beat Atlassian into providing what you want. Please open a support ticket with them.  :-)

1 vote
Mick C January 15, 2020

How incredibly arrogant and small minded.

1 vote
Mick C January 15, 2020

I think the use case is different. I don't have your 25 years I only have 12 but everywhere I've worked I hear a regular chime of "why can't you assign multiple people to a task". And I think this once again boils back down to that universal concept of "people are different".

In the team I look after almost all work is done in pairs and mobs. I find the "assignee" mechanism extremely useful for looking across the board and seeing who is on what. It's not about accountability or ultimate responsibility - I don't run my teams that way (again - different people do different things in different ways... shocker), it's about simply knowing who is on what.

Right now if suzy and steve are working on a task I can look at the board and only see suzy's avatar on a ticket. Unless I remember that steve is also on that task then I need to ask around. Magnify this by 12 teams and you see why this would be useful for me and many others who may have different requirements again.

What this ALWAYS boils back down to is that different people operate differently. Take that fact combined with a few other facts:

1) As you said yourself this argument has been happening for years and isn't going away

2) Atlassian themselves have admitted this is there most requested feature

and what you have is a basis for implementing this.

I don't mean to sound disrespectful or impolite but how you work is completely irrelevant to me and the thousands of other people who want this feature and could make it work for them in their specific use case.

1 vote
Mick C January 14, 2020

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- "The majority of the customers really really don't want it."

Do you have any data to back up that statement or is that simply opinion presented as fact?

Also don't you think that the fact it has prattled on for years and years and doesn't show any sign of going away tell you something?

1 vote
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 14, 2020

The majority of the customers really really don't want it.

This is an argument that has rattled on for years, even to the point where three people who were proponents of multiple assignees have ended up spending a lot of money with Partner or contractor support gradually unpicking the messes they've made of it.

There's nothing wrong with "associate" assignee(s), or "group generally responsible", but in the real world, multiple assignees allows for "I though the other one was doing it", and that is always a nasty mess when it happens.

1 vote
Mick C January 13, 2020

If overall accountability is really a concern and is really the reason Atlassian have refused to implement this then I'm really underwhelmed by your Product and Engineering talent.

Make the first assignee the "primary" or "lead" assignee. There you go, accountability problem solved.

1 vote
Mick C January 13, 2020

I completely understand however the overall point i'm making is that whilst that's how you think it should be done, there are many others who don't think it should be limited in that way. There are many use cases where it makes sense for the company / team involved.

All I'm saying is.... You do you and let me do me.

However Atlassian is laying down the law on this one and I just would like to know why. As you can see from one of the links above, this is recognised by Atlassian as their most asked for thing. So why are they not delivering it?

1 vote
Mick C January 13, 2020

Appreciate all this advice. I've read all the arguments all over the internet (well not "all" but a significant amount) about this issue and my point is moreso relating to the staggering amount of demand for this functionality.

Rather than Atlassian listing all the multiple workarounds, why won't they just implement multiple assignees to tasks?

It should work just like the single assignee works.

1 vote
Merve Nur Bas
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January 13, 2020

Okay, I see your accountability comment above and I agree. No one from outside can judge how accountability in your very own company works.

1 vote
Mick C January 13, 2020

Or... Atlassian could just listen to customers and allow multiple assignees per ticket? Is that too crazy?

0 votes
Mahmoud March 31, 2023

Hello @Mick C @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , in a case we have a vertically sliced story written by the product owner, working on it a team of non-full stack developers, this might include frontend, backend and maybe DB or networks as well, the story will have specific subtasks assigned to those team members, but how do we set the assignee of the story itself in this case? I was thinking of creating a story owner "the one who will present the story in a sprint review and own the story entirely", and a list of assignees who'll work on this story and it's subtasks collectively, have you stumbled upon such situation, how did you figure it out?  

0 votes
Julian C July 26, 2020

It's true, that it only takes one person to actually do the job but it's subject to the users availability.  

The process is sequential, the assignee for each stage can be different.  (Opt in)




0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 26, 2020

Still waiting for any single example where it might work.

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 26, 2020

Actually, yes, I think I've worked with the app you are talking about.  It died because

  • You should have a single assignee
  • It's a good thing to nominate other people, groups or roles as the secondary points of contact, but you can do that with custom fields, you don't need an app.

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