Is there a way to assign a task to multiple users?

[Deleted user]

We have Developers that may work on a task together.  Is there a way to assign it to both?

[Gikku · Accepted solution]

Hi @[deleted] 

You cannot assign a single Jira issue (Task) to multiple users at a time.

Best approach is to break the main Task by creating sub-tasks and then assign those sub tasks within the team as needed.

[Michael Schütz]

My point is about logging time. Often is does occur that more than one user is working on a task. If in the sprint meeting it is said it takes a week, do one task - do the sub-task time entries than combine to get the real picture as in how much time is spent against the planned time for the whole task ?

[Jeremiah Jonathon Landi, DDiv]

Michael Schütz,

I normally use an outside system for tracking tasks like meetings". I find a confluence task or Basecamp task does well. But I will also say I do not use the "time tracking" within JIRA to keep logs of my team work.

Harvest has a pretty robust solution for this and it is their stick.

Hope this helps!

[George]

This is a constant problem for many in Jira, we need the ability to notify or assign more than one person to a task on occasion. Why does Jira keep giving responses to defend their position? I thought their role as developers was to listen to users and respond accordingly with new features? 

Why don't you just create a Primary (limit to 1) and Secondary (1 or more) users we can assign to each task. Only the Primary can close the task but Secondary/s can view and comment. 

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

This is not a problem of Jira, but a problem of processes having more than one RESPONSIBLE person for a task at a time. Think about your processes, split a task to subtasks & you got the solution. And no, I’m not Jira, I‘m a customer. Mapping traditional processes to Jira often uncover the faults they have. Jira is a tool, which doesn’t make bad processes better...

[Eric Engelman]

I am a PO that has this same need, and have stopped using Jira for some projects where being able to assign a task to two people was critical.

So I want to support this request. I am not asking for commenters to tell me that my process is the problem.

[mvoncken]

We do pair and mob programming (2+).

If we decide to pair or mob on a task that task does have multiple people responsible.  

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

How do you define "responsible"? Pair programming takes the navigator/pilot approach and as a PO I'd still like to know who was pilot and who was navigator. Is this possible with two "responsible" people?

[Joe Downie]

Interesting that a software designed to facilitate working in teams does not allow this. Also the guy who is so stubborn he keeps commenting 'you can only have one person responsible' clearly has his head up his ass and does not understand that there is already a 'Reporter' field that is the person responsible for the completion of the task (the one you report to). Not the ones you assign it to. That's basic management hierarchy. So why can't you assign something to more than one person? Utter BS that promotes individualism, not teamwork.

[Jeremiah Jonathon Landi, DDiv]

mvonken,

We are pair programming and running into the same issue of two people working down the same task. It is going to be an interesting problem to solve within the constraints provided.

[Subhashis Bhattacharjee]

@JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_  : Can you explain how to create smartly task for 20 people attending a workshop for a problem solving? this is 1 task where all 20 are contributing, creating sub task for each person will make the board messy. currently it requires create 20task for 1 task and add name of each person, as they are contributing to same thing at the same time. If you answer the time tracking should be in another tool not Jira, my 2 points:

• Jira should remove work log feature as its for the purpose.
• And this situation is not only about time tracking rather for transparency as who all had been part of the task to solve the complex problem. so that in future it can be referred back and consulted etc

[Andrea Tseng]

@Eric Engelman Which product did you end up switching to for your other projects?  Would love to know what these other options are, thank you.

[Ken Orkis]

@Andrea Tseng @JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_ 

Teamworks has the ability to assign multiple people to a single task. My team members are struggling with migrating from Teamworks to Jira because of this missing feature.

[Tukajo]

@JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_ 

I'm sorry to hear that you've been unable to work at a company where team work and joint ownership is encouraged.

That sounds frustrating and miserable.

From my experience however, it is often fruitful to have multiple teammates work in tandem on a ticket or project, and to definitions of done and complete as a collective.

Not every company views work as siloed and individualistic.

[Brian Moeskau]

Just to add one more vote, this is explicitly required to properly support pairing / mobbing. Otherwise, on the team board, it looks like part of the team is just sitting idle half the time with no tickets assigned. Being able to show some level of (secondary?) assignment of shared tickets seems like an obvious solution.

[vincent citro]

jira is an extraordinary tool to organise many kind of differents projects and workflows. this  should be an option in the admin area in order to let administrators organise by themselves :(

[Kit Teguh]

I'd need to plus one this. We're changing our workflow so that the task ownership is team based rather than falling to an individual. Not a fan of the workarounds either where I'd need to talk to my IT to create a group email which comes with its own blockers, or using one of the costly plugins. I strongly feel this is something that Jira needs to support.

[Anatoly Spektor]

There is a workaround to do it!

This is CONTROVERSIAL topic. It seems like JIRA stance is 1 user  - 1 story, and it makes sense to have single point of responsibility, but real life more complex than that.

While there is no way to do it directly with Assignee field, you can do the following:

1. Create Multi User Selector custom field

2. Show it on the screen

3. Hide Assignee field

If you like me is more of a visual person, I have created a small Youtube video how to do it here

[Sha-Ron Cassel]

@Anatoly Spektor 

Thanks so much for this suggestion/workaround.  I plan to use it. 

It's funny how when I clicked for the video to come up, a Jira competitor ad appeared.  That competitor HAS multiple users for a single task.  It's a shame that the market giant would like you to instead go to their marketplace and pay a fee rather than having something so BASIC as part of the regular app. 

There's obviously a need that's not getting met.

[Hao XU]

I have the same demande.

none of the proposed solutions are good enough:

1. create sub tasks: I found this increase the number of task too much, in addition, this make the integration with bitbucket different to handle: normally, there will be FE PR and BE PR, as they have the same JIRA number, you know that they should be merged/published together.

2. create a customized field, this is not much better than add a comment to JIRA. there are drawbacks when you consider the intergrations like: filter with "assigned to me", notifications and so on.

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

I can recommend to try the ActivityTimeline add-on to solve the issue with multiple assignees. In some cases creation a sub-tasks are not a solution. As an example, when you need to split task between different days for the same user. 

Also there are possibility to manage how many hours are going to be put in each part of the ticket and give an additional flexibility for resource planning.

How to set up a multiple assignee is in our blog.

[Tina Maddox]

This is also a problem for Scrum Masters as well. We use the built-in "pair programmer" in the forms however, the workload is not reflected for EACH member of the team or when reporting the workload/done by each "assigned" user.

With the robust tools and reporting aspects Jira offers this seems to be a small adjustment to the existing platform that would make many aspects of Product Owners, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, etc have a better way to create accurate reports for their management teams.

 There seems to be a disillusioned idea here that adding the "just create sub-tasks" for each user is not a time constraint that could be completely resolved by adding the ability to assign multiple users to one Story or Task.

Please, Atlassian add this feature to the platform.

I'm sure I am not alone in this struggle of wearing multiple "hats" of responsibilities and looking for ways to streamline the continual demand lowering the time necessary to accomplish a simple task of creating issues.  They are time consuming as is.

[Tom Powers]

I have the sentiment that every team has their own use cases - so they have processes that are unique to them.  Sub-Tasks are not that convenient or worthwhile workaround for us.  Extra ticket management and they don't report the same as story's. 

With everyone starting to use  pair programming, mob programming, team or partial team swarming techniques that teams like to use and currently Jira does not make it easy to view multiple people who are working on one ticket to solve and complete that ticket. 

I agree with ownership or responsibility could be the first person listed.  To Improve visibility on the board it would be nice to see multiple people (assigned) and working on the ticket.  This is a feature Jira should provide since many teams are evolving the way they work.

Maybe Jira can't easily provide so they use 'process' and 1-ticket -- 1-Owner excuse??

[DDW]

Also waiting on this Multiple Assignee's feature. 
Just take our money, give the customer what they want, and stop whining about it. Wow, these community managers are more hostile than a rug pulled discord server full of crypto investors. 

[Ashkan Malekly]

Hii @[deleted] 

As @Gikku said its right, but you can make custom field as multi user picker and then assign it to the screen of your project and when you want to assign a task to 2 or more users, you mention all users in that. And for sending notification you can add the custom field that you have made.

Best regards

[Alex Tsariounov]

+1 on needing this feature.  btw, "insisting that one person is responsible for one task" is forcing policy on your customers.  all customers have different processes, please don't try to change them.

[Sean Feldman]

It's quite shocking to discover that a tool such as Jira doesn't support multiple assignees. No wonder platforms such as GitHub are more appealing to the teams that collaborate on work items.

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

Read the "Assignee" field as who is responsible for completing / progressing the task. If this is put on more than one person, it will end up in: "I thought, you were going to do it..."

Best

JP

[Manos Sifakis]

Understood. However why can’t you have one owner and then people that are secondary/supporters. You don’t always want to break down a task into too many sub tasks.

User Stories need multiple roles like Product Owner, Business Analyst, UI, Tech etc. to work on it at the same time. 

Am I the only one that thinks that multiple task per role / resource are overkill and add additional complexity for users as well?

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

You could see the "Assignee" of an issue as the person being responsible for it. What you can do, is creating a multi user custom field with the persons working on the issue. Still, one person is responsible (assignee). If you have many workers on an issue, who defines that the issue is done/finished?

[Ravish Kumar]

Hi, Why we need multiple assignees for single stories because we have columns for Ready for QA. Whenever we estimate any task we estimate with testing time. So I want to assign tester in every user stories otherwise its difficult to manage multiple tasks for one particular feature. 

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

It's actually not difficult: Auto create a subtask for each tester, where he has to estimated his testing time. This allows also for easy checking which tester didn't submit his estimated. You can then sum up the estimated time on the single story.

Simply read the assignee of an issue as responsible contact for progressing the issue & the person to contact, if there are questions on the process of the issue.

[RémiB]

When pair-programming, 2 people are responsible for the task, there is no leader that you could assign to it.

[Subhashis Bhattacharjee]

Jira suggesting more British slavery model, if task is assigned to 1 person no one should touch it to help solve together. That way it promotes not to help your team mates as there is no transparency of your contribution so no recognition of your team work. Better you mind your own business even if the teams fails due to a weak link :)

[andrew_wynyard]

Bit late to the party, but:

It would be great to be able to assign roles to a ticket. We have a developer responsible for a ticket, and then QA picks it up (a different person). In some cases it can switch back and forth fairly often. Making sub-tasks for QA would be more work than its worth. 

The problem in this scenario is that when QA picks up a ticket, and approves it, the developers often forget about the ticket, and it sits in approved but doesn't get merged. This is a "managing the team" thing, but having the ability to have custom roles on a ticket would help this out, and make it easier to track time.

[a_kaouris]

This is feature is useful when a task is assigned to more then one user. It is not strange to have more then one user working on the same task especially when you want to encourage team work. The feature would facilitate the coordination of the task and avoid having duplicate tasks for such a thing. 

[Stefano Viglino]

I probably found the solution to this problem -> https://about.gitlab.com/move-to-gitlab-from-atlassian/

[morgler]

Definitely need this! But Jira is not an agile tool after all, so no wonder they still push the old "assign a task to a simple head that could roll" notion.

As many already said: the "responsibility" for a backlog item is on the whole team in the agile world. We also have something called the "pull principle" in which it is desired people pull their work instead of having it "assigned to" them. We also try to put a name on a backlog item as late as possible in order to ensure agile resource allocation. Furthermore, backlog items in an agile world are written with business value and the user in mind, which usually doesn't make them map 1:1 onto one person's expertise (i.e. "online shop checkout" involves backend dev, frontend dev, ux and others).

The only reason we still need names on backlog items in an agile world is to easily know whom to address, if we have a question about a certain item. This is why it should be easy to attach my name to any backlog item I currently work on. As a bonus it would be great, if I could also limit my name to be put on max 2 or 3 items (aka WIP limit).

I know, Jira is not an agile tool – it comes from a different world with different rules and values. However, it is used in so many companies nowadays that Jira should also cater to agile folks.

[Michael Chernyakov]

This is somehow of a pain for me as we have a frontend developer and backend developer working in the same time and both are responsible. Assigning muliple people would be much more useful as they will also get the notifications regarding changes in the ticket. 

Sub-tasks do not solve the issue as it is double the work for me as PO. Maybe I would try to simple sub-tasks: create BE and create FE....but still would really love to assign multiple people.

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

You should try to automate the creation of subtasks, based on criteria you define in your issues. The assignee is the person responsible to move the issue to the next state. Who is doing this if more than one person is assigned? If there are two persons assigned they have to communicate with each other on either the work of the other one is complete or not.

I would always try to split up work until it can be assigned to a single person.

Just my 2c...