Best practices when a question is blocking progress on an issue

[Jessica_Moszkowicz]

I'm wondering if anyone has a good way of dealing with the following scenario. Let's say a JIRA issue is assigned to User A. User A begins work on the issue, but realizes that he or she needs to have a question answered from User B in order to proceed (or needs data from User B, etc.). The simplest thing is to simply mention User B in a comment with the question, but this doesn't always convey whether the issue is blocked on the question. I can certainly see ways to deal with this (assign the issue to User B, create a new status called something like "waiting on"), but I'm curious if other people have encountered similar scenarios and what strategies they've come up with to deal with the problem. I would add that simply assigning the issue to the other person really doesn't seem to work, at least in our current workflow. Usually, the issue was assigned to User A for a reason and User B won't necessarily be compelled to look at it immediately, especially if it's out of scope of what he or she is currently working on. So, it's not really correct to assign the issue outright to User B since User B may not care about any of the details of the issue. Thoughts?

[Bruna Griebeler]

Hello Jessica,

In cases like this, when other users need to jump in and do an action so the issue can proceed, we usually create "Epics" insetad of "Issues" using Agile: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Setting+Up+Epics+for+your+Project

So you'll be able to have an issue (called epic) that allows you to have other issues within.

Another option is to use sub-tasks: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+a+Sub-Task

[Jessica_Moszkowicz]

Interesting. So, the basic idea is to push the "issue" up the hierarchy so that it can have sub issues associated with it. We are just starting to experiment with epics here. Is it normal practice to first have a standard issue (story), but change it to an epic once it becomes apparent that there are things blocking its completion?