[Development] Auto-assignment in JIRA

[Shaw Andy]

I was creating another bug report earlier today in JIRA and I noticed that it was assigning to someone who didn't seem to be right for the component at all since I don't believe they are the maintainer for it and I recalled that this is not the first time I've noticed that the auto-assigner is clearly incorrect and therefore it could end up in some sort of limbo.

I know that anyone can pick up a bug report not actively being worked on so it doesn't have much meaning in that regard, but is there an actual benefit to having the auto-assigner set? Are the maintainers actively utilizing this or would it be best that all new bugs are unassigned by default and then someone picks them up when they are going to actively work on it? 

I don't have an agenda (aside from the auto-assignment being correct if this is the work flow we want) either way on this but I am curious as to whether it is useful or not. Therefore if it is useful then we can at least clean it up a bit so it is assigning correctly (either to the maintainer or to unassigned).

Andy