How to assign jira issues to groups

[Sam Taylor]

How to assign jira issues to groups

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

you can't. Here is the workaround. I got the details from another post

Assigning issue to multiple users

First of all, I want to emphasize that this is not a good idea. To assign an issue to multiple users is always a bad idea and you should always avoid it if you can. This is because, it's against the nature of Jira itself and it creates a problem with accountability. If an issue has multiple assignees, than you can't probably know who is responsible and also who did the most work, so it messes up the performance statistics. 

But, if a customer wants something, they want something. All you can do is explain why this is a bad idea and convince them otherwise but still commit to the idea. We got this question from multiple customers so we decided to at least create a solution and this is what we did:

• Firstly, we create different mail groups/distribution lists for different teams. For example; we have a mail group called sales@examplecompany.com and all the people in sales team are in this mail group.
• Second, we create a Jira userusing this mail address. Remove the user from the logon groups so it doesn’t count toward your license count.
• Then we create a workflow that assigns certain issues to this user based on something. This something can change according to your workflow, it can be a custom field value or a text parsed from summary or group that the reporter is in. 
• Then we create filterssuch as : "assignee = sales@examplecompany.com AND status = Not Assigned Yet". At this point we have different filters such as: Sales Issues, Marketing Issues, HR Issues etc. We also create dashboards with gadgets specific to the teams so that they can only be bothered with their own issues. You can also use queues if you use Service Desk.
• We also set the notification scheme to send mail to the assignee when the issue is created.
• Finally, all users look at the related filters or dashboards to their team and the user who first sees the issue assigns it to themselves.

[Josh Mak]

After reading multiple posts about this I understand Jira does not allow for multiple users to be assigned to a single issue, and I understand why Jira thinks this is a bad idea. However, is there an option where I can assign the whole 11 man team to do the same task? For example, if I need everyone (all 11 members) to watch a training video and complete the online training, is there any option where I create this issue and assign it to a group then Jira turns that into 11 individual issue (with a group member assigned to each one), or do I always have to go in and do 11 different child issues (under a complete "XYZ Training" Epic)?

I want the ability to assign all 11 people without having to do 11 child issues each time. I have to assign the whole team the same tasks (like online training or to review a document) often. All the work arounds I have read require setting up group emails like you (@Joe Pitt) posted, but I would like the group issue to be turned into multiple individual issues so they appear in the board for each user. To the user it will seem like an individual issue, but its ten less steps for me to assign it to every member of the group. 

[Joel Brotman]

I agree with Josh.  I want to do exactly the same thing.

[Joe Pitt]

@Josh Mak @Joel Brotman If you read the posts you should realize you can not assign an issue to multiple users. Period, end of discussion. It has always been that way and people have been asking for multiple assignees since I started using JIRA since 2006. They aren't going to change. 

You can create a multiple user picker to select users but they will not be assigned to the issue. They can filter on issues where they are listed in the user picker. The issue will not appear in the 'assigned to me' built in filter. 

[Rhobal]

@Josh Mak For your case, we created an automation task which picks up a keyword in the task ("FOR_ALL") and automatically creates a subtask for each user of the group.

But that case is different from assigning a task to a group: You want every member of the group to complete the task, therefore you need a task or subtask for each member so you can track the status individually.

I would also like to assign a task to a group so that any one person of the group can take the task and complete it. I simply use labels for this, so the group can check the unassigned open task in this label and pick tasks to complete

[Avinash Bhagawati _Appfire_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sam Taylor ,

Basically JIRA is designed so that issues must be assigned to individual users prevent tasks from being overlooked. A team lead or manager should assign issues out to individuals, or your users will pick from a list of issues that they have the option to take on.

However, if you want to configure JIRA to allow group membership then you can use custom field for group picker to identify the issue. Please refer below documentation on the same.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/how-do-i-assign-issues-to-multiple-users-207489749.html?_ga=2.6788850.13189330.1570538441-1940279406.1570033613#HowdoIassignissuestomultipleusers-ManagingIssuesviaGroupOwnership

Thanks,

Avinash

[Sean M]

Funnily enough, we use the workaround of assigning to groups to issues (not real groups... unlicensed proxy-users with a mailing list for an email address) to ensure shift workers DON'T overlook things. But that's just our use case...

[Smitha Medabalimi]

@Sean M,

How can we create unlicensed proxy-users in Jira cloud? Our Jira users need to be added to a group which is synced from external directory. And we are not able to get a group added in it.

[Rezgar Cadro _Totem Dev_]

If you actually want 10 people do the same task, the proper approach is to spawn 10 sub-tasks and assign them to individual workers. That's because each user will start/finish the task at different times, produce different deliverables and you likely want to know whether and when each of the people has completed it. No need to do it manually, it can be easily automated with native Jira Automation (e.g. when task of type X moves from Backlog to Ready for Work, read group from a custom field, fetch all users in the group, for each user - spawn a sub-task). 

If you don’t actually intend for all these people to work on the issue at the same time, and interpret is as “the task should be worked on by one of these people” or “each of these people will work on the task at different stages”, I have a different recommendation.

Instead of specifying a long list of (potential) assignees, our app, Skills for Jira, lets you specify skill requirements, i.e. which skills the assignee should have to take this task. You can then see all qualified assignees directly on the issue. You can then manually choose one of the experts to assign to or enable self-service and have people pull the next most important task they are qualified for with 1 click. You get to configure and prioritize work queues, priorities, limit work in progress etc. 

This way you can model both of the use cases, only assigning the task to a qualified assignee or having people with different qualifications pick the task up through its life-cycle.

[Xheneta G. Hyseni]

Have you tried the following, via automation?