How can I Assign a Story to multiple people?

[Mateo Gonzalez]

Hello! I'm trying to set up Jira for my company (Software Development) on the free trial (looking for our best option as Notion doesn't meet our needs anymore).

I think it's strange how according to Jira's documentation, Stories are used when multiple people must work on something. However, the default field "Assignee" will only let you Assign 1 person. I've been reading the documentation and questions/answers from the community, however I'm still struggling to set this up:

1. Most of our stories/tasks require 2 to 3 people to develop (Front-End, Back-End, design/Web). - We require multiple assignments.
2. Assigning Teams is not a good solution for us, as assigned people can vary widely (we have 10 front, 15 back and 5 design/web developers, so there are more than 1,000 possible combinations!!!!)
3. I've created the custom field "Assigned" in which we can assign multiple users to a task (awesome!), but: 
   a.  When I export issues to a CSV, it only shows one of the people assigned, not the 3 of them, so I guess when I import all info, It'll only get 1 of them.
   b. Assignee field doesn't appear anymore on the Issue information, but it still does on the Issue's list, and even though I assigned it to 4 users (including me) on the custom field "Assigned", it won't show up on the Active Sprint when I filter by "Assigned to me". However, it does show up when I filter to show only "Unassigned" (I assigned it to 4 people!!!). This means my custom field is not being recognized by Jira as an assignment, making it useless, as I need my developers to see their tasks by using the filter "Assigned to me". 

BTW: I created custom Issues, Issue Types, Issue schemes, Screens, Screen Schemes, Permission Schemes, EVERYTHING! And I've associated all of them to my project. In none of them I have the assignee field, but It's still showing on the Issues list.

Please Help! Any way of making this custom field the one Jira understands as assignment? It's just Illogical that Jira says Stories are tasks for multiple people and Assignee only allows you to add one person... Thanks for your help in advance!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, assignee is deliberately built to be the single person currently responsible for the issue.

This is by design - in the real world, you absolutely do not want to have multiple assignees, it simply does not work, you will always end up with "I thought another assignee was doing it".   I've spent a good chunk of my time with several clients unpicking the mess made when people do it.

Of course, it's absolutely a good idea to have something that says "if the assignee isn't around, here are the other people to talk to".  A team field, or a list of people are the two most common approaches and both work really well.  Your custom field is the right way to do it, but it is not the assignee, and hence will never show in "assigned to me" searches.  You'll need to do your own searches for "assigned = currentUser()" or "assigned = specific <person>".  I'm not sure about the export problem though, which CSV export are you using?

In scrum, the assignee is a lot less important as well.  The team deal with the issue, not an individual, but they inherently work closely together, so it's likely they all know enough about their issues to be able to talk about how they're progressing.  A lot of scrum teams I've worked with don't even bother with the assignee, or if they have to name someone, they all nominate their scrum master.

Nor is there anything wrong with breaking up stories into pieces that can be assigned to different people - sub-tasks can be really good for that.

[Mateo Gonzalez]

Thanks for the reply @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- ! I agree with you in most cases. However, in our industry (software development), most of the tasks are developed by 2 people: a front developer (who builds what the end-user sees, including fields and buttons), and a back-end developer (who builds all the code and calculations that will appear on those fields created by the front). This means that stories are built by both, each one is responsible for its own side of the task, but none of them can be individually responsible for the task. With that being said, they both need to see the task on their own sprint board, as each one of them has to work independently on the same task, and that way they'll know the work they have to do on every sprint and check their personal progress based on this tasks assigned to them... so what you're saying doesn't really apply to this case. Do you have any other ideas for accomplishing this?

Btw, I wonder why Atlassian doesn't implement the multiple assignee, when I'm seeing that this is one of the most popular requests done by the community... just wondering. Thanks!

[Pramodh M]

Hi @Mateo Gonzalez 

Welcome to the community 🙂

You can use multi user picker to exactly show who are the assignees worked on that issue.

Along with this having tempo timesheets will give you the reports of how many assignees have worked on each ticket if you track the member in assignee field.

Let me know if you have any queries

Thanks,

Pramodh

[Mateo Gonzalez]

Hi @Pramodh M , thanks for your reply. 

I had already use the multi user pick on a custom fiel I named "Assigned". However, when my team goes to the board and filter on Assigned by me, tasks will not appear as it seems like this field is not actually assigning tasks to people, just showing names, and that is exactly what I need... Is there any way for my staff to see all the tasks in which they appear under my custom muti user pick field? Thanks in advance.