Jira users on Vacation

[Per Falk]

Does anyone have a solution for users on vacation?

Set user as non-assignable or auto assign to someone else?

[Isaiah]

I appreciate your post is fairly old - nevertheless we had the same "out of office" problems that you describe.

As a Marketplace Vendor, we ended up building our own Plugin:

Meet Out of Office Assistant for Jira Cloud

If you are still looking for a solution, maybe it's with a look.

[Véronique Gareau-Chiasson]

Thanks, I will keep this in mind!

[J Thomas]

To make someone not assignable you could use the 'Assignable user' project permission and grant it to a certain group or role, then temporarily remove anyone on vacation from that group/role.

If you use role or group based conditions in your workflows then you could make sure that someone else is in the same groups/roles so they can perform the same tasks as the absent user.

Also you/they could temporarily change their email address to their stand-in's email so the stand-in is sent any emails that would have gone to the absent user (but then the absent user won't receive them).

[Eva]

have you thought of using the listener? If the JIRA email get bounce back with "out of office" then automaticallyl assign the issue to the project lead?

[Per Falk]

We are using Jira for help desk purpose and I think this is the best solution for us, I will look in to it. Thanks

[Ali Aziz]

Hi Per, This was a long time ago but may I please know what solution you eventually settled on and how you implemented it? Thank you.

[Akeles]

We built a plugin to handle this use case requested by a client.

It allows the assignee to set the duration which he/she is on vacation and specify the covering personnel to reassign the issue to at individual project level. It also allow adding a out of office message as a comment to the issue.

We thought it is useful and decided to put it up on the Atlassian Marketplace. You can check out the plugin wiki page for more details.

[LynF]

Hi We will be installing this on our test server today, and if successful moving to our production server. However one question. This deals with issue assignments and will prove very useful and far better than trying to enforce practice / process change. A question tho: is it possible to extend this to jira subscription of filters so that email subscriptions are not sent by Jira - and for that matter notifications on event triggers?

[Akeles]

Hi Lyn, Can you elaborate about the jira subscription of filters so that we can understand the context?

[LynF]

Hi , apologies for the delay in responding. JIRA filters allow for subscribers based on groups, roles etc. JIRA will then send the filter as an email to people / groups who have subscribed to it at preset time(s). The times set can be different for different users. This is what I am referring to. The other form of notification is done for issues once an event is triggered such as Issue Created, Issue Updated etc. These can be found in the notification scheme applied to individual projects. Would it be possible for your tool to stop these emails from JIRA when the out of office is set in a users profile?

[Akeles]

Hi Lyn, I'm afraid that is not possible since the emails are not sent from Out of Office.

[LynF]

Hi Thanks for looking into this and the response. We will continue with our plans to test this add on. Lyn

[Guy Eden]

An alternate method is to use intermediate status queues rather than assigning issues directly to individuals.

An example: in our workflow, product management may schedule an issue for a particular fix version, after which the issue needs to be assigned to a developer.

The workflow for this involves three statuses: Being Scheduled, Release Assigned, and In Development.

1. Initially the issue will be in status Being Scheduled, and assigned to the product manager.
2. Once the product manager wishes to release the issue to development, they hit the transition to Release Assigned. This changes the status of the issue, but the assignee remains the product manager.
3. The relevant dev guys all have filters to monitor for anything in Release Assigned status, and get email notification as well. Anyone in the relevant project role can then hit the In Development transition, which auto-assigns the issue to this user.

The advantage of this method is that the next person (or people) who must look a the issue are alerted, but the ownership remains with you until one of them proactively accepts it. If no-one is accepting, you know that you must chase them!

[Radu Dumitriu]

Not out-of-the box. You can resolve this by:

1. Enforcing discipline in teams

2. Letting the PM / TL manage it (but they can be in vacation, too)

3. Write a plugin which gets this info from some additional system and prevents / warns the TL / PM upon assigning issues.