Report of viewed issues
Asked by Jan ?imek:

Is there a possible way how to setup a report or filter on which issues have somebody looked? And I dont mean assigned or updated in commentary - I really mean looked.

Because we have got an agent which have a lot of assigned issues, but he is not really replying on them and even though we have setup a filter which is sending him what is assigned to him, we are unsure if he even does read it. And yes everything is about communication, but in this case we need to know. And yes I know about watcher feature, but it is not helping as we are only needing to see when someone has looked at the issue.

Is it doable or not?

Thank you


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Jira only tracks who has looked at an issue in a transient way - it can poke it into an activity stream in some cases, but it doesn't track what people look at in any detail, nor does it record it.

There is [https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211596/whos-looking-for-jira-cloud?hosting=cloud\&tab=overview](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211596/whos-looking-for-jira-cloud?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) which lets you know who currently has an issue open.

But there's actually a massive problem with the concept. What counts as "looking"? I've worked on projects where I've never opened an issue in the issue view. I've been able to explain the issue in great detail, comment, update, resolve and close issues without ever "looking at it". I've "looked at it" via email, boards, the issue navigator, the REST API, and and and. And done the updates by those routes too. In some cases I've solved problems without ever looking at the issue that was raised. Someone has mentioned it to me and I've given them a solution.

I'm afraid that you have a problem here that does not have a technical solution. Knowing whether your person has looked at an issue or not does not help you solve it.

This is very much a people problem. You need to talk to this person and establish what they are actually doing, and why they are not updating the issues. The fact they are not updating them tells us that they're not doing their job properly. You need to investigate that. Being able to say "you never looked" or "we know you looked" is not going to help you start the conversation. It's actually quite confrontational, and a better starting place would be to pretend to assume that they are reading the issues and asking "why are they not getting updated when you've worked on them?"

comments: author: Jan ?imek
body: I understand the point, unfortunately that is a management view of solution and we needed to set that. I would define it as when person open the issue.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: You will need to explain to your management that they are trying to look at the wrong thing, and wasting their time trying to do micromanagement like this.

It is simply the wrong way to think about how people are working. What your managers should be looking at is the assignee - the person who has the responsibility for getting the issue done. Whether the assignee "looks" at the issue or not is totally irrelevant to the job of getting it done.

In your case, that's the agent who isn't updating the issues. You don't really care whether they're looking at them, but you do know that they are not updating them, so their line manager probably needs to a conversation with them about why they're not doing their job.


author: Jan ?imek
body: Yeah I have already tried to explain, unfortunately company policy is not possible to change :-)


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I feel that pain, there's so many places where the management are behaving in poor and counter-productive ways. When they build "policy" that entrenches poor behaviour, it's time to get out!


Tags: cloud

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