How can I convince my users that issues' being assigned to mailing lists is a bad idea?

[DavidM]

We've migrated from Bugzilla (with millions of "bugs") to JIRA. In our Bugzilla instance, we let mailing list quasi-users own bugs, and that nominally meant that a subscriber would fix it. The entire mailing list would get notified when bug activity occurred.

We're trying for a new paradigm with our JIRA instance that issues should be assigned only to humans and that the proper assignee is the person who is responsible to see that the issue is resolved. The primary motivation is to encourage accountability. If an issue is assigned to a mailing list, how does anyone know that anyone is actually subscribed to it or that anyone pays any attention to list traffic? If entreaties to the mailing list fall on inattentive subscribers, what then? Human assignees have managers, and reporters can ping those managers if issues are given short shrift.

So much pushback! I'm getting besieged with terribly convoluted use cases that involve assigning issues to mailing list quasi-users to implement some process. Bugzilla doesn't have Service Desk or activity stream dashboards, so I can understand and sympathize with how those crazy processes came to be. However, there are some people who are terribly resistant to using the new capabilities that come with JIRA.

So far, I've been arguing on two fronts: the philosophical front of why it's not a good idea and how to use JIRA's capabilities to achieve some end, but I could use some more good points on both.

Thanks for reading!

[Matheus Fernandes]

• Accountability, as you mentioned
• Reporting
• Well.... tracking! It is so much easier to track when you can actually search for an user
• Related to reporting, but you can see real time how much work is assigned to each person, to better balance work distribution.

Also, it may be a good point to ask "why would assign to a mail list do us good" in the first place?

If needed, you can find some mid-ground as in How do I assign issues to multiple users.

[MattS]

I know. Point out that when an issue is owned by a group of people then no one feels they have to do anything about it. And that notification is separate from owning an issue. 

[Darren Pegg]

Seems to me a massive culture change is required, applications can't enforce this only help faciilite the processes in place.

Seems like a massive job and I imagine a very frustrating scenario.!