I did some searching because I thought this was already a task, but I couldn't find anything.
Anyway, sometimes we have tasks which involve multiple people on a team working on a task. This isn't the same as assigning a project, because it could be any combination of team members, not a project-wide assignment.
We don't plan to support this. There are various technical/product/priority reasons, but philosophically I think it's important that ownership be unambiguous. I'm also not aware of any task systems which support this.
Among other tasks systems, JIRA also doesn't support this, and suggests some workarounds here:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/How+do+I+assign+issues+to+multiple+users
Including reasonable approaches like:
And creative approaches like:
3/4 of JIRA's workarounds are really about group ownership, although it sounds like that isn't your use case.
For these "group ownership" use cases, things like shared queues may be available in Phabricator after Nuance. We might let tasks be owned by projects eventually (some discussion in, e.g., T5551).
I used to think this way. After all, in an extreme programming environment it is common for two people to be working on the same task at the same time at the same machine.
However, in this end I decided this was flawed thinking.
Here is what we do now:
Note: I use the term actor because not everyone involved in a task is a programmer :)
One "task" : Multiple People Working Independently
The task clearly has sub-tasks. You should create appropriate sub-tasks and assign them to each actor.
One "task" : Multiple People Working on it an XP style
The task is split into two sub-tasks. One for the "Driver" and one for the "Navigator". Each actor reports their time in either of these two sub-tasks. The Driver and and Navigator do not swap roles in the middle of a task.
This method has the benefit of keeping time tracking and velocity figures accurate. Trying to allocate two or more people to the same task in any other way will under-report actual times.