Atlassian update - August 2024
Thank you for your feedback regarding the New Assignee Smart Search feature in Jira. We understand that the current limitation of displaying only five users can make it challenging to assign issues when there are more users involved.

This behavior was implemented to reduce CPU load and improve performance. However, we recognize the need for a more flexible solution that balances performance with usability. While there are ongoing discussions about potential improvements, there are no immediate plans to change this behavior.

Your feedback is valuable, and I will forward it to our product team for consideration in future updates. In the meantime, we recommend using the search functionality within the Assignee field to find and assign users efficiently.

We appreciate your understanding and support. If you have any further questions or need assistance, please feel free to reach out.

Best regards,
Joe Nguyen
Product Manager - Jira Cloud
jnguyen2@atlassian.com

The New Assignee Smart search was added to reduce CPU load by reducing the number of values returned in the Assignee field to 5 when selected but in effect makes it extremely difficult for users with the assign issues permissions to be able to assign users when there are more than 5 users in a project, and functionally removes the purpose of having an assignee search feature in the first place.

Currently the Assignee field will display a "self" referance for currently logged in users and Then 4 additional calls for user search on event count on the request is hard coded value of 5:

{batch: [{context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…},…],…}
batch: [{context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…},…]
0: {context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…}
1: {context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…}
2: {context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…}
3: {context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…}
4: {context: {locale: "en_US", screen: {width: 1920, height: 1080, density: 1},…},…}
metadata: {eventCount: 5, resilienceMechanism: "indexeddb"}
eventCount: 5
resilienceMechanism: "indexeddb"
sentAt: "2022-03-04T19:23:51.571Z"

Meaning regardless of the number of users available in the project only the last 4 users that have been assigned to issues and the currently logged-in user will be displayed.

To add new assignees that are in the assignable user list you must manually type out the users' name into the field for the value to be suggested, In effect, this makes it difficult for users in the project to be able to search for alternate users to assign an issue to as it requires user memory to recall what values are possible rather than an old method which included a pre-populated list of assignable users.

Currently, the only method for a user to see a list of all assignable users is for that user to be a project admin and have access to the "Project Settings >> Access" settings menu where a list of team members can be seen, However, default settings allow for any user with the "Member" permissions to assign issues to other members, and there is no option for those members to see a list of the full team and must assign from memory thus removes a critical function of a pre-populated list