How can I restrict amount of issues owned by a user at a given time?

[Nathan Householder]

We have a process where issues can be accepted by the first available team member. There are times where if a team member is working on more than one issue at a time, some of them get neglected.

My desire is to restrict a user from owning more than two issues at a time.

Our process is as follows:

1. Status: New Issue
2. Status: Status Pending
3. Status: Implementation Queue
4. Status: Request in Progress
5. Status: Under Quality Review

Inside the "Implementation Queue", there are a list of issues that can be accepted by any team member, and when it is completed, they move the issue to "Under Quality Review" indicating that they have completed what was needed in the the issue.

I am finding that team members continue to start working on new issues when they have a couple already in "Request in Progress."

Our automations assign the owner based off of who moved the issue from "Implementation Queue" to "Request in Progress."

How can I restrict a user from moving another issue's stage if they currently own 2 issues already?

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

Nothing out of the box allows that. I don't know what is available in the cloud. A scripting solution may work. The out of the box solution is to have all issues initially assigned to the project lead or component lead and have them assign issues based on workload. You will need to remove the permission to assign issues from all other user users. That could create a bottleneck if an issue needs to be assigned to different people as it goes through the workflow.