What is the easiest way to assign users?

Eric Sara
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April 15, 2014

I am in the process of seeing if JIRA is the right tool for our business.

While I know it is targeted at the software development industry I am hoping to extend this.

We are a business that does software development and consulting (this incorporates support and implementations).

I am hoping to find one tool that will work for the whole business so that we have everything together.

I like what I see in JIRA for the development team and even support, however, for implementations I am just not quite there.

I can see that using Agile could be a good answer and I like the way I can see tasks moving through a workflow.

However, I would also like to be able to see who the work is assigned to, what work is unassigned and just move the work to a user. Much like you can move the work through stages.

Has anyone worked with JIRA like this and have any pointers?

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Eric Sara
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July 31, 2014

Just goes to how that reinventing the wheel is not always best.

While the concept above that we were after would work, we have started to use Scrums and are finding that this is working well. I will close this for now in the hope that the direction we are heading will fit our purpose.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 15, 2014

Who is responsible for what work is important in Jira. The core of this is the "assignee" field - Jira works on the assumption that the person named in that field is the person currently working on and owning the issue (and then workload reporting and so-on follows on from that)

You can add more fields to capture more people's interest in the issue. It's not uncommon to see projects that have fields like Developer, QA, Manager and so-on on them, representing ownership inside teams (the assignee remains "the current person in charge of the issue"). For the slightly more advanced users, you often see things like "when issue is moved from development to test, automatically change the assignee to the person named in the QA field".

Then there's estimates, where you estimate how long an issue is going to take. Developers can then log work against issues so you not only get information about work remaing vs done, you can also start to see how good the estimates are (With plugins, you can easily turn that into detailed work reports and timesheets as well)

In short, it's very easy to use the assignee field to drive "who the work is assigned to", "what is unassigned" and rapidly change it.

Eric Sara
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April 20, 2014

I guess what I am looking for is a visual on the assignee filed that could be shown just like the columns in Agile.

Each user, in say a group, would have their own column (with one being unassigned) and the work can be moved from on column to another. It would be good also it if then had a calculation of the total number of hours for that user. I am sure it could be taken even further but I am only looking to keep it simple at this point.

Mizan
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April 20, 2014

Why not set the assignee via a post function ? refer this for setting the assignee .http://plugins.intenso.pl/display/PLUG/Change+Reporter+or+Assignee

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 20, 2014

That's another good point - you can do quite a lot of automation. Even without complex plugins, you can do things like set an assignee from other fields (If, for example, you set a "QA person" field when the issue is created, you can copy that to assignee when moving into the testing part of the workflow)

Eric Sara
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April 21, 2014

Good suggestions. But the way we would like to use it is that we have a number of issues/tasks that are unassigned and then to assign them we just move them to the user with a drag and drop. I am looking at the Tempo Planner to see if this has it, however I need to wait until we have the download version of JIRA to do this. I will let you all know if this has what I am looking for.

But - always open for new ideas too.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 21, 2014

I'm not aware of anything that will do this - you can easily find unassigned issues, on all sorts of ways, but there's no drag and drop type screens (Even from plugins). I suspect it's because pulling issues around screens is seen as a status update rather than other data, and you've got the problem that there could be a lot of potential assignees, leading to some interesting layout questions.

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