Am I able to assign multiple resources to a single issue?

[Samantha Taylor]

I have some issues that multiple people work on at the same time, am I able to assign this one issue to multiple people? Would I have to create multiple instances of the same issue to assign it.

[Ansar Rezaei · Accepted solution]

You have multiple options

1- Create subtasks for each of people in the task

2- Create a multi-user picker custom field and use it for these cases

3- Break down the main issue into two separate and related issue and assign each one separately

The order of my list is my preference for these situations.

[Raymond J Wohltman]

If I have an operational, day to day task and want to assign it to several people on a team, is there an easy way to do this? This is a pretty common think to do, I hope it isn't as complicated as it sounds... I'm coming from MS Project and it's pretty simple there, is there an equivalent here?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You should never assign an issue to many people, in real life, it will break things, you'll miss stuff.  It's a terrible thing to do with an issue.  

But that from is the definition of assignee in Jira - the assignee is the person who is currently supposed to be getting the issue dealt with  - that can never be a group or team.

But it's never a bad thing to have a group or team involved in an issue so that when the assignee isn't around or is not working on it, you have other people you can ask and even re-assign to.

@Ansar Rezaei already gave you some options, but I would add:

• Create a group-picker field and populate that with the responsible group
• Create a select list with a list of teams as the options
• Use boards.  A board represents a team's current work - if an issue is on a team's board, the team owns it

[Jason Mamaloukas]

One more option, if you are admin of your project you can create an extra resource field in your issues. I name it "backup" or "2nd assignee" to show its a two person job.

[Jack Brickey]

No and you should not IMO. What you should consider is to have a parent task and create sub-tasks under this parent assigning them to the individuals. This will ensure ownership and accountability will be maintained.

[Doug Waddell]

Surely you are not advocating separate sub-tasks if you are utilizing pair programming with TDD? 

Would you make a "create unit test" & "code to unit test" sub-task for every story that uses TDD with pair programming?

[Jack Brickey]

Hi Doug,

No i'm not advocating any solution specifically for pair programming with TDD. I did not read that into Samantha's post. Admittedly, that underlying detail might apply here but it is just as likely that it does not.

What I was attempting to convey was:

1. this is my opinion
2. the Jira solution focuses on single user ownership for clarity of ownership

It is worth mentioning that you can certainly get around 'assigning an issue to a team/group', but (again IMO) it is messy and error prone.

Regarding your last question, we are not using pair programming w/ TDD at my workplace thus any answer I give would lack experience so will abstain. However, you might find this Community article of interest - Managing-Assignee-when-you-do-Pair-Programming 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Pair-programming is the one time that multiple assignees for a task actually works in real life.  Probably becuase it is a short life-cycle with a high focus.