Coverer Setup and Management
Coverers are the people who take over your work items while an Out of Office rule is running. You name them on the rule itself, so a two-day absence and a month of parental leave can hand over to different people.
Add coverers to a rule
Open Out of Office Assistant from the Jira Apps menu, then go to the My Rules tab.
Select Add rule for myself. The rule form opens as a full page.
Set the dates and the work items the rule applies to, then go to Coverers.
Select the field, which reads Type to search for users, and choose an entry from the list. Repeat for each further coverer.
Select Create Rule.
Each coverer you pick stays in the field as a chip with its own remove control, and the clear control at the end of the field empties it.
If the Coverers field is missing, check whether Show Out of Office status in work item glance only is ticked. That option removes coverers, approver coverers and the message from the form, because such a rule only publishes your status and reassigns nothing. Clear the checkbox to get the fields back.
Share the work between several coverers
Name more than one coverer and the app spreads incoming work items evenly across them in rotation.
The rotation also copes with permissions. If a coverer cannot be given a work item because they have no access to its space, the app passes that work item to the next coverer instead of leaving it with you.
To check what a rule actually did, select its button in the Reassignments column of My Rules; it reads 8 of 8 passed when every handover succeeded. The Reassignment Log it opens lists the work items that went to a coverer under Reassignments, and any the app could not hand over under Failures.
Leave work items unassigned
Unassigned sits at the top of the coverer list, above the people. Select it the same way, and work items that would have gone to a coverer are left with no assignee for the duration of the absence.
Use it where a queue, not a person, owns the work, such as a service desk team that triages from a filter.
Hand over approvals separately
Approver Coverers is its own field, with its own user picker and a second selector that chooses which Jira approval field the substitution applies to: Approvers, the default, or Manager. Coverers take over assignments; approver coverers stand in for you on Jira Service Management approvals. Filling one does not fill the other.
For which approvals are passed on, what happens when your substitute is also an approver, and how delegated approvals come back to you, see Approval Delegation for Jira Service Management.
After the rule starts
A rule acts on work items as they reach you. Anything already assigned to you when the absence begins stays with you until you hand it over, which Bulk Assign does in one step for everything inside the rule's scope.
Who is covering for whom is shown in the Coverers column of both the rules list and the team availability list, so you can check a colleague's cover without opening their rule. To change coverers, edit the rule from its row in My Rules; to take reassigned work items back when you return, see Reclaiming Reassigned Issues.
If the same people cover for you every time, save the coverers once in a template and choose it from Choose Template when you create a rule. See Templates for Out of Office Rules.