How Jira selects user to assign tickets when Automation is configured to "Balanced workload" assigning

Summary

In Jira Automation, Balanced Workload is one of the available actions that ensures that issues are assigned to a group of users evenly. Jira automation will retrieve the total number of assigned issues in the project the rule is scoped, unless otherwise specified in the "JQL to restrict issues" field.

In some scenarios, multiple users will have the same number of tickets and this article explains how Balanced Assignment operates in such situations.

Balanced Assignment with Equal Ticket Counts:

• Randomized selection among equal ticket counts: When multiple users have the same lowest number of assigned tickets, Balanced Assignment randomly selects the next user for ticket assignment.

  • Example Scenario - All Users with zero tickets: If all users in a group have zero tickets assigned, the Balanced Assignment function will randomly pick one of these users to assign the next ticket.

• Sequential assignments with varied ticket counts: As tickets are assigned and the number of tickets per user changes, Balanced Assignment continues to focus on users with the lowest count. For instance, if one user now has one ticket and others have none, the next assignment will randomly select from the users who still have zero tickets.

Conclusion

Balanced Assignment in Jira Automation aims to distribute workload evenly, but its approach can appear random when users have the same number of tickets. It will always select from the group of users with the least tickets, but within that group, the choice is made randomly. Understanding this behavior is crucial for teams seeking to use this feature effectively for equitable workload distribution.

Known bug

We are currently investigating a behavior where the distribution is not working evenly. The situation this bug manifests is still under the investigation in the link below:

• AUTO-145 - Assigning tickets using "Balanced workload" is not assigning them evenly