Multiple assignees for issues

Resources

UX @dimitrieh FE @ClemMakesApps BE @vsizov

Docs blurb

GitLab is a tool that encourages everyone to contribute, and often multiple people likely work on the same issue together. This can especially be difficult to track in large teams where there is shared ownership of an issue, and those multiple folks may not work together day to day. With this release, GitLab enables you to assign as many users as you want to a given issue. Every one of those assignees are first class citizens, and receive the same notifications as before. With this change, you can now also search for issues for two or more assignees. Each search result will have at least the set of assignees you have specified.

Description

• EE Starter Edition
• Multiple assignees for an issue
• Within an issue, view and edit the multiple assignees. Same existing permissions for these actions as now, for one assignee.
• No maximum number of assignees.
• The designs should be scalable to 7 assignees. But they don't have to look "good" beyond that. We expect users to use the feature responsibly and not just keep assigning too many people. And so we give the responsibility to them, rather than putting a restriction on the upper limit, since putting an upper limit requires additional work that is not worth it. We don't have upper limits for other fields (labels, participants). So from that perspective, we do not need to enforce an upper limit.
• If there is a good reason to enforce an upper limit, that will be a future feature, not in scope here.
• When there is an update for an issue, GitLab triggers notification emails and todos for the assignee. For the scope of this issue, the only change is that those triggers happen multiple times for each assignee. That is, each assignee receives the same notification email and todo. Even if the email text copy is worded that implies one assignee, that does not change. That is out of scope for this issue.
• Searches in the search bar for issues list is a separate issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28947
• Update issue export to dump multiple assignees, i.e. updating this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1480

Out of scope

Merge requests are out of scope for this issue.

Design

Issue and Issue board sidebar

1 Assignee in the sidebar stay the same

2 Assignees an onwards should be 5 Assignees per row in the sidebar

6 Assignees and more

6 Assignees and more expanded

Closed sidebar

1 assignee

2 Assignees

more than 2 assignees

more than 99 assignees

Assigning an assignee from the sidebar

Issue board cards

Following your "stacked" approach, we can show up to three pictures in the corner

1 assignee	2 assignees	3 assignees

Through hovering or clicking on the pictures, we can expand them to show a little more detail. We can cover over the issue title with a transparency gradient and slide them out to the left. If there are 4 assignees, we can show them all, and if there are more than 4, we can use the fourth circle to indicate the number of remaining assignees

3 assignees	More than 4 assignees

Issue list rows

1 to 4 assignees

More than 4 assignees

Slash commands

Assigning

Unassigning

System note

Will follow this pattern, next to what is already there:

assigned to multiple assignees at the same time

Assigned to someone if there already is one or multiple assignees

removed all assignees

Show which assignees you unassigned, when you unassigned all assignees. (as this is valuable information).

Let's to this up to a max of 5 people.. and let the rest be shown as X others

removing assignee and assigning assignee (same logic as with labels)

removing assignee and assigning assignee while there still is/are another assignee(s)

extra note: Unassigned from would be nice as in:

Search

See: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28947