How to get a feedback if an assignee has opened/read an issue

[Stanislav Korotky]

Is there a way, that an issue is somehow marked/flagged if a new assignee has opened the issue? I mean, if I assign an issue to a user, I'd like to know if he/she opened it at least once - this gives me knowledge, that the user is aware of the issue and I have no need to poke he/she regarding this.

[Mizan · Accepted solution]

Hi Stan ,

One possible solution can be to add a new initial status for the assignee as "Acknowledged" . when a issue is assigned the first step for the assignee will be to acknowledge , this way you will come to know which issues are acknowledged .

[Stanislav Korotky]

I did this several years ago in our workflow, but this does not solve the problem, because I can not be sure that the user saw the issue and not acknowledged it. What you suggest is simply to add one more step which became a new point of uncertainty.

[Stanislav Korotky]

I'm accepting this as a most simple, available so far solution, though it does not solve the problem completely.

[Renjith Pillai]

Some alternate solution that came to mind. If you are okay with adding an automatic worklog everytime and issue is accessed by the assignee, you can achieve that using javascript (add to announcement banner):

Once added if the assignee accesses the issue, a worklog entry will appear in the issue stating 'I accessed the issue'

<script type='text/javascript'>
AJS.$(document).ready(function() {
var assignee = AJS.$('#assignee-val .user-hover').attr("rel");
var user = AJS.$('#header-details-user-fullname').attr('data-username');
if(assignee == user) {
AJS.$.ajax({ type: "POST", url: AJS.contextPath() + '/rest/api/latest/issue/' + AJS.$('#key-val').text() + '/worklog?adjustEstimate=leave', data: '{"comment":"I accessed the issue","timeSpent":"1m"}', contentType : 'application/json' });
}
});
</script>

[Stanislav Korotky]

Your solution looks promising, but I can't check it right now, so I'm just upvoting it. Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Jira doesn't log reads - it would be an absolutely massive overhead, inefficent and painful to implement for very little benefit. I doubt it'll ever be implemented, and it would probably be quite difficult to do by hacking the code.

If you've got Apache or a web-server in front of it, you could try to do something horrid like parse the incoming logs for "browse to issue X", but to give you an idea of how much fun that would be, we generate 2Gb of Apache log a day.

The whole point of the email system is to give your users the "poke" you're asking for. If they choose to ignore it, change your human processes to say "do not ignore Jira emails".

[Stanislav Korotky]

I can't completely agree. What overheads are you speaking about? When a user opens an issue, he/she creates an 'overhead' for DB and connection anyhow, which has much bigger footprint than a single flag. For example, this site with QA does log views and did not choked by 'overheads'.

I'm asking not about poking itself, but about back notification if the poke succeeds. Jira is a tool for changing human processes. If we could change the human processes just so simple, then Jira would be useless.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Mmm, ask the developers why most applications don't attempt to record that sort of detail.

As for your human processes - why are your users ignoring the "create" email and/or updates?

[Stanislav Korotky]

I think nowadays there is a lot of (may be most of) web-applications which track user activity on the fly and show it.

I didn't say that they ignore something. But there exist many different circumstances under which users may react to new issues with different latency, and I'd like to know if this happens.

[Jacques]

There is no such thing as a read-receipt (if that's what you're looking for).

The only solution I see is that you set up your notification scheme to alert the new assignee of the new issue and that should alert him/her to start looking into it. Since the alert mail itself already contains lots of information about the issue you could consider this as your "poke".

hope this helps,
Jacques.

[Stanislav Korotky]

Yes, it works just so, but the problem is that I want the feedback for this poke. Something like notification of e-mail receipt, which is supported by majority of e-mail clients.