Suggestions for helping users that forget to reassign and/or reopen tickets?

[Emily Spencer]

The way that my team is currently using Jira is fairly dependent on users remembering to assign tickets to one another and reopen tickets instead of just adding comments to tickets that are closed or resolved and expecting a response.

We use Jira in something of help desk style. We track/address issues coming from many different departments in the company. I've been running myself ragged trying to remind people of these two key parts of the process but I'm wondering if there's a change that I can make to Jira to try to fix this issue.

I was thinking of removing the comment field from the main View Issue screen but are there options? I also have a couple of restrictions:

• I didn't want to make any changes that involved plugins / editing code
• This change would only apply to one project

Thank you in advance!

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

There's a really simple trick that would force their hand here...

Create a copy of the workflow you are currently using. You need to do this if you're using the default workflow (because you can't edit that), or, more importantly because you said you only want to apply it to one project. As this trick is workflow based, you'lre going to want to separate them.

Once you've got a copy, then edit it and look for the status where you want to stop them commenting/assigning. You'll need to repeat these changes for each status you need to deal with.

Open the step that the status belong to and look for "properties". Add two of them:

• jira.permission.comment.user - denied
• jira.issue.editable - false

The first one blocks them from commenting, and the second blocks all edits, including reassign. This is a slightly blunt method of doing it, but if they find they can't do anything with a closed/resolved issue until they reopen it, it solves the problem

[Emily Spencer]

Thank you for the suggestion!

We have this same issue on tickets that are open: people will just add a comment but not reassign it. Would "jira.permission.comment.user - denied" disable adding comments during a transition as well?

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist]]

No, it won't stop a comment there, I believe.

I tend to cheat on reopen in a different way, using a post-function to set the assignee to previous-developer, reporter or current-user depending on who we want to be responsible for it. Reporter and current-user can be a bit blunt, as they make the user have to think and re-assign it again later