How to use Automation to assign a Closed issue back to Resolver

[tomivey]

In our workflow when an Issue moves from Resolved to Closed (i.e. the Reporter or someone else checks the work of the person that Resolved the issue, and closes it if it satisfies their needs), we then prefer to assign it back to the Resolver (i.e. the person who transitioned it from In Progress to Resolved.

The idea being that if it needs to be Reopened, then it's automatically back on the person that did the work). This also easily allows people to see the work they've completed to satisfaction for a sprint (or a whole project), and other benefits.

I've looked at Automation rules, but in Assign Issue the only paths near to what we want are "Another field value or comment -> Previous Assignee", or to use a Smart value, which also only allows for things like Reporter or Assignee.  However, this solution only works if the flow is our expected Reporter->Resolver->Reporter, which sometimes gets interrupted as work gets passed around for who is doing the resolving (say, a QA person taking some confirmation work from another QA person).

Does this concept just not exist, because Workflows are not defined clearly enough as being done by a role concept? Or am I missing something?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @tomivey 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Because of the highly configurable nature of Jira it is not possible to have a built in concept for "assign it to the person who did the work". There can be any number of customizations to the workflow such that Jira cannot automatically identify "who did the work".

You could use automation to record in another field who the assignee was when the issue was transitioned from In Progress to Resolved, and then use that other field to reset the Assignee field when you choose to do so (i.e. when it is transitioned to Closed).

[tomivey]

That makes sense, and that's a clever workaround. I'll definitely try that! Thanks!