Edit a ticket when the assignee no longer exists..

[Deleted user]

When trying to edit a ticket that is resolved, the assignee no longer exists due to leaving the company.

I get the following error message

"<username> does not exists"

To get around this we had to reassign the ticket then carry on with the edit, however this then misleads who actually did the work on the ticket.

Is it possible to allow editing of tickets even the assignee no longer exists.

[Matt Doar · Accepted solution]

Deactivated users don't count towards the user count for the licenses. The problem I see is when someone is removed entirely from Active Directory which remove them entirely from JIRA. Then editing an issue can fail due to not having a user.

[Chaithra N]

Hi,

Make sure you dont have a Assignee field on your edit screen & then try editing the ticket.

Or have a new transition without Assignee field on the screen & then try editing the ticket.

This was working in our JIRA

[Brian Brooks]

This worked for me on JIRA 6.4.1.  Had to modify the JIRA project's "Screen Schemes":

1. Copy screen used for Scrum Screen to a new screen "Screen without Assignee".
2. Configure "Screen without Assignee", removing the "Assignee" field (and "Reporter" field).
3. "Configure" the scrum screen scheme.
4. Click the button in top right "Associate an Issue Operation with a Screen".
   1. Select "Issue Operation" > "Edit Issue".
   2. Select new screen created above "Screen without Assignee".
   3. Click "Add".
5. Now editing an issue doesn't try to update the Assignee field.

[Deleted user]

But we need the history of a ticket for audit purposes, so doing this is not possible. We would possible lose valuable history of a ticket.

[Deleted user]

I think the only way to do this, is to create a user locally to jira with the same name and then deactivate them to see if this will allow a user to edit a ticket.

We will set this up on the test server to see if it works.

[skorzinetzki]

Perhaps merge every leaving employee in a single account called "employee left" or something like this. You will lose the concrete relation of the ticket to specific person, but since the person left, this isn't that relevant anymore?!

[codelab expert]

I think the only way to do that is to activate the user again.

[Deleted user]

But this requires a license, also our instance authenticates against Active Directory so when a user is disabled and remove from the relevent group the user is removed from Jira. We cant really have stale active users in Jira.

[codelab expert]

Yes, that's right. But this is the license model of Atlassian: You'll need a valid license for every account which is assignable.