Should you change Assigneed to Unassigned when you close an Issue?

[Deborah Genevro]

This is probably more of a philosophical question.  I've always kept issues assigned to the last person that actually closes the ticket.  Recently, I have a user that is changing the Assignee from himself to Unassigned when he closes the ticket.  Before I ask him to keep himself as the Assignee, I thought I'd ask the community for some advice.

Can anyone give me the pros and cons?  Or, does it really matter since it is closed?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

As a starting point, no.  You should leave the assignee on the issue for the simple reason that it can be handy to be able to do things like "of all the closed issues, who last worked on them?" and if someone is removing themselves, you lose the ability to report that.

There is only one benefit of removing yourself as assignee - the "assigned to me" filter works.  But that usually indicates the person doesn't understand what "closed" is, as the "assigned to me" filter is almost always coupled with "and still open". 

It's very likely that your user is simply wasting their time and needs a little help grasping basic Jira reporting.

[Srinivasan Anantharaman]

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- This sounds interesting. Do you have any reference from jira documentation / best practices to follow on "assignee". Sometimes it makes easier to present to the management / admin teams.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's no documentation on this in Atlassian's stuff because it is all about process, and they don't dictate your processes to you.

Think through how you want to report on who did what.  It's very likely that you will find that you want to be able to say "person X was the last person who had responsibility for dealing with this".

[Ruchi Chaudhary · Accepted solution]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- - When I close my issues, assignee filed automatically changed to unassigned. This makes it hard for me to track my closed issues. Do you what could be the reason?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is a post-function in the workflow that is emptying out the assignee field, or a listener spotting "issue closed" and doing the emptying.

[Ruchi Chaudhary]

ok...Thanks, Nic.

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

I agree from an historical value. Also, I don't allow any unassigned issues. They don't get worked. Once you allow unassigned issues you'll never know what is and isn't assigned without running a report.