Making the assignee field required

By default, the assignee field has an unassigned option, which is equivalent to making the field optional. If you check out field configuration, you would realize that you cannot make the assignee field required, as there is no such option available.

In this recipe, we will look at how to disable the unassigned option, effectively making the assignee a required field.

How to do it...

Proceed with the following steps to disable the unassigned option:

1. Log in to JIRA as a JIRA administrator.
2. Navigate to Administration | System.
3. Click on the Edit Settings button.
4. Scroll down, and select the OFF option for Allow unassigned issues; click on Update.

As shown in the following screenshot, once the option is disabled, issues can no longer be unassigned: