Implications of replacing Assignee Field with a "Responsible" Custom Field

Doods Perea August 7, 2013

We have a requirement of assigning JIRA tickets to more than one users, and decided this can be done by creating a custom field of multi-user picker type that will accept one or more values. The Assignee field will therefore be disabled from the project.

The challenge/question(s) are: what would be the implication of disabling (hiding) the Assignee field? I understand the Screens, Notification, Permission and Workflow configurations (and probably mail content wording) will have to be updated. Are there other configuration in the project that I am missing here?

Thanks in advance for your help.

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EddieW
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August 7, 2013

Some other things to consider.)

* Assignee is one of the only fields that can be locked for editing to spefic roles/users("Assign Users" permission)

* Many built in filters will break (i.e. "My unresolved issues")

* The quick search "my" keyword will break (i.e. "my PROJECT bugs")

== Edit, adding more..

As Doods pointing out the "Assign" and "Assign to Me" would break, likewise the corresponding keyboard shortcuts "a" and "i".

== end edit

And lastly, although I fully understand the need to add multiple people as contributors via a dedicated field, but leaving things responsble to many people may result in a lack of ownership.

Doods Perea August 7, 2013

Thanks for the prompt response Eddie.

I can see the problem with "Assign" and "Assign To Me" buttons in the ticket being visible to users with the appropriate permissions ("Assign Issues", "Assignable User"), but this can be solved by disabling the Issue Operations plugin.

Regarding ownership, we have another custom field called "Accountable" that would be the owner of the process and the main navigator for the ticket.

I agree with you regarding the built-in filters that would break. The "My" Quick Search would yield inaccurate results. Thanks for pointing that out. :)

In consideration of the preceding paragraph we may have to rethink our approach. Maybe we can keep the the "Assignee" field after all, leave the "Accountable" out and make the "Assignee" the owner of the ticket.

Still, we can use the "Accountable" field for what it is originally intended to do, "Assignee" field as the "main worker" of the ticket and "Responsible" field for the "other" workers of the same ticket. With this we are most probably not going to break anything built-in in JIRA, and at the same time meet the requirement of having identified other workers for the ticket.

Thanks again.

Doods

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