add multiple assignees

[Robert Rudolph]

When in projects and creating a list of tasks, how do I assign more than one assignee to each task?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You do not.  The assignee field in Jira is intended to show you who the person currently responsible for getting the issue done is.  That should only ever be a single person - in real life, you will find your projects fail if you have more than one assignee.  Half of my contracts as a Jira admin started with "we need to tidy up our Jira to make it usable", and every single one had, as a part of it "get rid of our botched multiple assignee process/fields".

But, there is nothing wrong with logging many people for secondary responsibilty - if the assignee is not around (leaves, takes a holiday, changes teams etc), and you have a lot of options around it.

• As @Sreenivasaraju P  says, breaking up an issue into sub-tasks for different assignees works well for some processes (it was one of the things Atlassian originally added sub-tasks to do it!)
• Add a "Team" type custom field (or derive it from the assignee's profile or the project)
• Work off a Scrum or Kanban board and work with team equivalence - "this board = this team".  The assignee becomes less important, it's still the currently responsible person, but just to stop other people selecting it to work on, because the assignee already has.
• If you can organise your associated people into groups, then create a group-picker field (this has some perks in that you can use it for permissions, notifications, security and even limiting the possible assignee list to the members of the group) 
• Add a multi-user picker and name the other people directly

There are other options and you can get clever with the ones above and others.  What you need to do next is look at how your people are working, specifically how they are handling "who is doing this", so you can map it on to one of the options.

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Robert Rudolph ,

You cannot add multiple assignees to a ticket. Instead you can create new User picker(single user) or User picker(multiple user) field and name like Developers, QA team etc add them to the project screens. 

Also if you want to assign ticket to team/groups, follow below steps. 

create a group picker(single group) custom field. 

1. Identify users for each group and create groups for them. (Example: IT Hardware group for Hardware related issues and add users who deal with those tickets)
Go to Admin -->User Management --> groups --> Create groups

2. Create group picker(single group) custom field and name like "Assignee group".

3. Add the custom field for related project issue type screens where required.

4. Create queues based on the "Assignee group" JQL condition and share the queue/filter link with respective teams.
Example: Assignee group = "IT Hardware group" and status != Resolved


Even you can create automation rules to auto-update assignee group field based on the text link the summary/description fields. 
Example: summary ~hardware

[Michael Diaz]

If you create a burndown chart for stories will the assignee group show up in the burndown or will it still be listing the single assignee? Ideally for my scenario, id like to be able to produce a burndown for the assignee group. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Burndown is not done for individuals, it is done for the team executing the sprint.

[Sreenivasaraju P · Accepted solution]

Hi @Robert Rudolph ,

As per my knowledge, Out of the box, Jira doesn't support multiple assignee concept.  At any point of time, any task can be assigned to single user. 

If you want to assign an task to multiple users, you can split it in to subtask and assign them to different users.

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

As @Sreenivasaraju P said you can't. Another option if you want to assign it to a group is to create a distribution list in email, create a user with that email, and assign that user. The user will then need to be in the assignable user list in the project. 

[Karyna Tyrnavska _SaaSJet]

HI, @Robert Rudolph !

As an alternative, you can check out 2 add-ons, developed by my team. 

• Recurring Checklists and Report plugin that allows to create custom checklist and add it to Jira issue. So,  you get ToDo list inside tasks. And you can select multiple assignees for these tasks. An example below

• Business Process Manager add-on. My team has created it to automate business procedures and improve management. You can add multiple assignees to the issue, but add-on also allows to run tasks automatically through the workflow, approve issues, set up blockers and other features.