When a teammate goes on leave, their open Jira tickets do not go on leave with them. Without an automatic handover, those tickets stall, sprint velocity drops, and customers wait. Hello Nomad's Atlassian Forge app auto-reassigns open issues at leave start and restores them on return — no spreadsheet, no Slack thread, no forgotten handover doc.
The problem: open tickets pile up while people are out
A developer on your team books two weeks off. She has 12 open Jira tickets assigned to her: three in active sprints, four in code review, five in the backlog. The sprint board has her name on half the in-progress work.
The day before she leaves, someone might create a handover document. It will list some of the tickets, miss others, and be outdated within 48 hours as new issues are filed and priorities shift. The coverer — a teammate who agreed to "cover" — has no formal connection to those tickets in Jira. They are not the assignee. Jira notifications go to the person who is on leave. The tickets sit.
Two weeks later, the developer returns. She spends her first morning triaging what happened to each ticket while she was away. Some moved forward. Some regressed. Two were closed without her knowing. The coverer has since been assigned four new tickets and has lost context on the ones they temporarily owned.
This is not a failure of process or communication. It is a failure of tooling. The leave system and the project management system are not connected.
The 3 patterns teams try (and why they all fail)
Pattern 1: Do nothing
The most common approach. Tickets stay assigned to the person on leave. Jira sends notifications to their inbox which they do not check (or do check, which defeats the point of leave). Reviewers ping them on Slack. Sprint planning proceeds with a large chunk of "in progress" work that is actually blocked.
The cost shows up in sprint retrospectives: "Why did we carry over so many tickets this sprint?" The answer is someone was out for two weeks and nobody reassigned anything.
Pattern 2: Shared inbox or team assignment
Some teams respond by assigning tickets to a "team" user or a shared account during leave. Responsibility is now diffused. Everyone can see the ticket. Nobody owns it. Jira's notification system stops working because there is no individual to ping. Decisions stall because there is no named person accountable.
This approach works for inbound support queues where triage is the model. It does not work for development work where individual context and expertise matter.
Pattern 3: Manual reassignment
A manager or the departing teammate manually reassigns every open ticket to a coverer in Jira before the leave starts. This works exactly once and then people stop doing it.
The reasons it fails at scale: the process requires two systems (leave management + Jira), it is easy to miss tickets in large backlogs, it requires the departing person to do extra work right before they take time off, and on return nobody remembers to reassign the tickets back. The coverer keeps receiving Jira notifications for tickets that are no longer theirs to own.
How Vacation App solves Jira ticket coverage
Vacation App connects your leave management system to Jira Cloud using the Atlassian Forge platform . The integration handles the full lifecycle: reassign at leave start, confirm the handover, restore on return.
Automatic reassignment at leave start. When a leave request is approved and the start date arrives, Vacation App identifies all open Jira issues currently assigned to the person going on leave and reassigns them to the designated coverer. This happens without any manual action from the departing teammate or their manager.
Comment with context on every reassigned issue. Vacation App adds a comment to each reassigned ticket linking back to the approved leave request. The coverer and any watchers can see exactly why the ticket was reassigned and who the original assignee is. There is no ambiguity about whether this is a permanent change.
Per-request opt-out. Not every leave needs Jira reassignment. A two-hour medical appointment that gets flagged as leave should not trigger a full ticket handover. Vacation App lets the requester toggle off Jira reassignment on a per-request basis, so the automation only runs when it makes sense.
Selective restoration on return. When the leave ends and the teammate returns, Vacation App reassigns their tickets back — but only tickets still owned by the coverer. If the coverer, the sprint manager, or anyone else reassigned a ticket during the leave period, Vacation App does not override that. Work that moved on stays where it is.
A walkthrough: from leave approval to ticket handover
Here is the exact sequence when Vacation App's Jira integration is active.
- Install the Forge app. An admin installs Vacation App's Jira Forge app from the Atlassian Marketplace and connects it to your Vacation App workspace from Integrations → Jira. The connection takes under 5 minutes.
- Map users. Vacation App matches team members by email address between your Vacation App workspace and your Jira Cloud site. Where emails match, the mapping is automatic.
- A teammate submits a leave request. During submission, the requester designates a coverer. They can leave Jira reassignment enabled (the default) or opt out for this specific request.
- The request is approved. The leave goes through the standard Vacation App approval flow — Slack DM, web app, or Microsoft Teams Adaptive Card.
- Leave start day arrives. Vacation App queries Jira for all open issues assigned to the teammate, reassigns them to the coverer, and posts a comment on each linking to the approved leave. The coverer receives Jira notifications from that point forward.
- Leave end day arrives. Vacation App finds all issues still assigned to the coverer that were originally reassigned from this leave request and returns them to the original assignee. The coverer stops receiving notifications for those issues.
The entire flow requires zero manual action after the initial leave request. Your sprints stay clean. Your coverer has real ownership. Your returning teammate steps back into their work without a triage marathon.
What this looks like in your sprint board
Before Vacation App's Jira integration: a sprint board on day 3 of a teammate's leave has their tickets sitting in "In Progress" with no movement, no assignee change, and notifications going to an empty inbox. The sprint is already at risk.
After Vacation App's Jira integration: the sprint board shows the coverer's name on those tickets from day one of the leave. They are the assignee. Jira sends them notifications. Pull request reviews get routed to them. The sprint continues with real ownership on every ticket.
Vacation App's Jira integration is available on the Premium plan at $4 per user per month .
Frequently asked questions
Does this work with Jira Server or Jira Data Center?
No. Vacation App’s Jira integration uses the Atlassian Forge platform, which is available on Jira Cloud only. Jira Server and Jira Data Center are not supported.
What about issues the coverer started working on during the leave?
Vacation App only reassigns tickets back to the original assignee if they are still assigned to the coverer at the time of return. If the coverer has been reassigned by your team in Jira during the leave period, Vacation App leaves those issues as-is and does not override the new assignment.
How do I disable Jira reassignment for a specific leave request?
When submitting a leave request in Vacation App, the requester can toggle off Jira ticket reassignment for that specific request. The setting is per-request, so it does not affect other requests or the global default.
Where does Vacation App store Jira data?
Vacation App stores only the Jira site URL, the mapped user IDs for assignee matching, and the list of issues reassigned during a leave. No ticket content, comments, or attachments are stored. The Forge app runs inside the Atlassian cloud infrastructure.
How do I uninstall the Forge app?
Remove the Vacation App Forge app from your Jira site via the Atlassian Marketplace or your Jira apps settings page. In Vacation App, navigate to Integrations → Jira and disconnect the installation. Any tickets reassigned during active leaves will need to be manually reassigned.
Ready to simplify leave management for your team? Vacation App is free for teams up to 10 members. No credit card required.