How can I track original assignee when story is being reassigned till its accepted

[Surinder Sehgal]

At the start of sprint, the story is assigned to one resource say developer. Once he is done, tester is assigned to story. Assignee keeps on changing till the story is accepted by PO.  Is there a report or way to track who worked on the story initially. Sometimes, testing is also done by developer. 

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello Surinder,

JIRA does not natively store the users that were assigned to an issue to a field that can be viewed as a list, but you can poll against the assignee field using the WAS Operator.

On a user by user basis the  JQL "assignee != username AND assignee was username" could give you a issue list of issues that the specific user was assigned to but is no longer the assignee, and add in some additional filter options to narrow down the results to you project or tracking criteria.

Regards,
Earl 

[Surinder Sehgal]

Hi Earl, thank you very much for your response!

I am looking at the query. As I understood, I used the query putting in all the details as below. For e.g for checking my issues I used the following query

surinder.sehgal != abc001 AND surinder.sehgal was abc001

here Surinder.sehgal is assignee in JIRA and abc001 is the username 

And it did not produce any results. It gives following errors

Field “Surinder.sehgal” does not exist or you don’t have permission to view it

History searches don’t support the “Surinder.sehgal” field 

The value “abc001” does not exit for the field “Surinder.sehgal”

i am new to JIRA so I could be doing differently than required. 

Please advice. 

....and Thanks again 

Surinder Sehgal 

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hi Surinder,

The value  "Assignee" in the exe I gave is the field name where "userename" would be the variable that you want to replace. 

Try using this Format:

assignee != surinder.sehgal AND assignee was surinder.sehgal

Regards,
Earl

[Surinder Sehgal]

Thanks Earl! I ran the query and got the output. Let me analyze the same and will get back to you. ….Thanks for your help. Surinder 

[Thao Nguyen]

Was also looking for this. Thanks for the clear answer, Earl!

[Matt W]

3.5 years later, a great little tip, @Earl McCutcheon , thank you

[Prateek Sharan Lall]

Checking this five years later, never knew we have a 'was' operator as well. Thanks!

[Nick Socci]

Is it possible to search for multiple assignees using the was clause?  

[Roland Traier-Kiss _Midori_]

@Surinder Sehgal and all,

You can also try the default report in Better PDF Exporter for Jira which gives you a historical timeline of past assignees of a Jira issue. It's much simpler to create than advanced JQL queries or similar difficult workarounds.

Usage of the Jira assignee history report is summarized in this blog.

(Please note that Better PDF Exporter is a paid and supported app and I'm part of the team developing it.)