On 11/21/06, Vincent Massol <vincent@massol.net> wrote:

While I understand the rationale with default assignee, the reason I'm
pointing this out is because I've also seen drawbacks of this strategy on
other projects and in the end we've removed the default assignee for those
projects. The reasons:

1) Assignee means: ok I'll handle that issue. If it's a patch it means I'll
apply this patch. The problem is the default assignee may be doing something
else and will not handle it before a long time, thus misleading the issue
reporter. In practice we often see huge number of issues assigned to someone
who doesn't have time to handle them all. So JIRA says they are assigned
when in practice they're not really...

2) Even more important, it also means that it doesn't provide free room for
someone to work on an issue because it's already assigned. Yes I know anyone
could reassign an issue to himself but it's bad practice without asking the
first assignee. Thus it takes more time and in practice I doubt lots of
people are going to do it as everyone is all too happy to see someone is
already assigned!

3) We don't have statistics of issues who are being assigned vs others who
are not being managed. Same we don't really know what issues Jeremi (and the
component leads in generam) are really working on.

It's not a big deal but I was just surprised and I know perfectly well
Jeremi is not going to work anytime soon (if ever actually!) on the issue I
created and which was assigned automatically to him. It just looked strange.

If the idea is for the component lead to notice the issues then this can be
done in 2 ways:
* by sending all jira issues to the commit list. We really NEED this.
* by changing the notification (if it's not already like this) so that
component lead receive notifications for all issues for their component.

I personally think it's much better for someone to say explicitely: I'm
assigning these issues to me as I'm going to work on them rather than them
being assigned by default. In this manner this person will commit himself.

WDYT?

Thanks
-Vincent