This bothers me on almost all project management software.
What I'd love to see, is to be able to assign one person as the one "responsible" and then assign others ad-hoc when/if they work on-, review-, discuss, or co-author it.
Some software allows multiple assignees, but as the ancient management-saying goes: if everyone is responsible, no-one is. So i'd still love to have one person assigned with a special role or label.
Yeah this is an issue with my current company's use of Jira. They're super worried about tickets being "lost" so they all have to be assigned to one person, but then that means you can't tell who is actually working on something.
My previous company used Phabricator and you only assigned yourself a task when you actually started working on it. It meant anyone could work on anything - much more agile and much much better knowledge spreading and teamwork.
But I understand where my current company is coming from. You want a "person who is responsible for making sure this eventually gets done" field and a "person who is currently working on this" field.
> You want a "person who is responsible for making sure this eventually gets done" field and a "person who is currently working on this" field.
Indeed. But the last part should be plural. Because in reality multiple people work on it. A reviewer, someone who helped with the UX, the person you spoke to to get the exact business-details right, that colleague you needed to finetune the SQL, or the moment bob goes on vacation and you need to step in and take over his work.
At my work we have a couple of different roles that get involved in each ticket, so we created custom fields in Jira to assign those roles.
So each ticket gets a Primary Developer, Primary SME, etc, but might get assigned to some one else to do one small bit of work (e.g., it'll get assigned to a different developer for code review, but whoever's listed as the Primary Developer is still responsible for it).
Sure, but you can have plenty of options where there's one responsible person, but you may still want to track another person who's involved. Maybe another engineer who's paired on the project, or the PM who's taking point on it, or the QA who's testing it, or the other engineer who's reviewing it.
Having to rely on comments or assignment history to uncover that information is a bad experience.
Perhaps? But I do plenty of projects where I'm just paired with another engineer. I'm maybe taking lead, but they're sitting in on all the meetings and helping make decisions when I want someone to check my work. That may be worth noting in a ticket in case I'm busy or out of office and someone needs an answer around the project, even if they don't have a specific task they're responsible for that they'd be assigned a child ticket for.
It's also a level of precision question. At some point, having a lot of child tickets is just extra work if it's mostly just documenting something that could have been as easily documented by attaching another person's name to the parent ticket.
What I'd love to see, is to be able to assign one person as the one "responsible" and then assign others ad-hoc when/if they work on-, review-, discuss, or co-author it.
Some software allows multiple assignees, but as the ancient management-saying goes: if everyone is responsible, no-one is. So i'd still love to have one person assigned with a special role or label.