New features: Teams in Automations and membersOf() in JQL

[#1]

Hi Teams community 👋

We heard your feedback and shipped two improvements that make Teams more powerful:

• Use Teams in automations to route and manage work

• Filter work items by <assignee or reporter> of Teams with membersOf() JQL

Teams in automations

You can now use Teams directly in automation rules. For example, assign issues to a team or trigger rules based on changes in the team field.

We’ve covered all the details, examples, and how‑tos in a separate article - read more here: Automate your workflows with Atlassian Teams in automations!

membersOf() JQL function

With membersOf() JQL, you can filter work items by “every <assignee> a part of this Team” instead of listing individual users. As people join or leave the Team, your filters update automatically, so your boards and reports stay accurate with less manual maintenance.

Previously, membersOf() only worked with groups:

`assignee in membersOf("jira-administrators")

Now you can also target a Team by its ID:

assignee in membersOf("id:<teamId>")

How do use it?

See work items assigned to members of a specific team:

assignee in membersOf("id:<teamId>")

See work items assigned to members of a specific team, group, or users:

reporter in membersOf("id:<teamA>")  OR reporter in membersOf("id:<teamB>")  OR reporter = jsmith

Currently, this only works when you use id:<teamId> in your JQL.

To find your team’s ID:

1. Open the team’s profile page. The URL will look like:
   https://home.atlassian.com/o/<your-org-id>/people/team/<team-id>?<site-id>

2. Copy the <team-id> part from the URL and use it in your JQL: membersOf("id:<team-id>").

You’ll know it’s correct when the team name appears as a lozenge in the field like so:

Feedback

Let us know how these features are helpful and where we can improve 🙏 Please tag me in any feedback you have.

[April Chi]

For membersOf() JQL, we've gotten early feedback asking for a JQL function to view all tickets assigned to all Teams a user is a member of. If that is what you also need for your workflows, please vote and comment in this suggestion ticket here with your use case.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @April Chi - this is really great.

It would be amazing if we can use the Team name (just like Group names) instead or even along with of the ID.

But, regardless that, I am really happy with this update. Thanks to you, the product team and Atlassian for pushing this.

Yatish

[Rudy Holtkamp]

Like Yatish says, this is a great first step, thank you April, but for regular users it is almost impossible to understand. 

The next step would be that you can use team names. If that technically is not feasible, then I would opt for a separate function: membersOfTeam .

[Martin Flury]

@April Chi This helps a lot and reduces time updating filters, when I now just can update a team.

But when I test it, functionally it works, but I do not see the team name. In my JQL the ID remains visible, which makes it not very usable, if you don't see what team you are filtering for.
I mean the owner/creator of the JQL knows, but every viewer  not.

Correction:
The ID remains unchanged in the first search query.
Only when the search results are sorted in a column is the team ID replaced by the team name.
This still seems to me to be an error when exactly the ID should be replaced by the name.

Second correction:
The behaviour changes with each test...
Now the name is displayed immediately when the ID is entered. Just as it should be.
So everything is fine (For now? Will it be different again in the next test?)

[Talita Goulart]

This is really useful, but it would be easier to use if we had autocomplete as we type the team name, rather than copying the ID from the team URL.

[April Chi]

Hey team, thanks so much for all the feedback!

@Yatish Madhav @Rudy Holtkamp @Talita Goulart @Martin Flury 

We’ve heard your requests about using team names and having autocomplete loud and clear - supporting selection by team name is on our radar.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to do this for the initial release. The original membersOf() function didn’t support autocomplete, and extending this to work well with Teams is a larger technical change especially as team names aren’t guaranteed unique today.

If having autocomplete within membersOf() is important, please consider voting for this ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-97552.

We really do look at this feedback and use it to prioritise work - it’s a big part of how we were able to ship this functionality and also deliver teams in automations.

In the meantime, we’re currently focussed on addressing the problem of duplicate / non-unique team names. 

[April Chi]

@Martin Flury 

After entering the teamID, does the teamId not resolve to a lozenge with the team name? Is it fixed now or is this still a problem? Let me know and I can look into it for you

[Martin Flury]

@April Chi 

Good point with your justification for going after the Team ID.
Unique Team names are indeed not guaranteed currently.

I'll take that argument for our users as well (they for sure gonna request using team name as well).

At my first tests, the teamID did not resolve (unfortunately I did not record this testings) and I was very curious how I'm gonna explain that and train our users with this behavior.
But now it resolves to the team name straight away.

So all good for this point.

[April Chi]

Good point with your justification for going after the Team ID.
Unique Team names are indeed not guaranteed currently.

I'll take that argument for our users as well (they for sure gonna request using team name as well).

Yes, calling out that we do acknowledge this is an improvement we need to work on though. Would love for you to upvote it here https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-97552 to make sure this is something we can address in the future after addressing team name uniqueness. 

At my first tests, the teamID did not resolve (unfortunately I did not record this testings) and I was very curious how I'm gonna explain that and train our users with this behavior.
But now it resolves to the team name straight away.

Nice, @Martin Fluryet me know if you encounter it again and we can look into it. 

[Martin Flury]

@April Chi 

Another future request for a function with Teams would be taking the hierarchy of teams into consideration.

When querying a parent team, including its sub-teams.
Currently i see the teams hierarchy is a visual organisation only, with no functional value.

Example:

• parent team 1
  • Sub-team 1.1
    • sub-team 1.1.1 (user a, b)
    • sub-team 1.1.2 (user c, d)
  • Sub-team 1.1 (user e)

Querying users in team 1 should include all users of the sub-teams through all levels -> users a, b, c, d and e.

Currently you can not even create a team, consisting of sub-teams, without have any users assigned to (like the parent team 1 or the sub-team 1.1 in my example above).

[Reid DeWolfe]

@April Chi 
This appears to work fine with standard Teams, but when attempting to use this to query for members of a Verified Team(one synced with an AAD group) I get an error, though the team lozenge does populate with the team name as expected

Function 'membersOf' can not generate a list of users for 'id:redacted'; The group or team does not exist. When using teams, you must use id:teamID.

[Derek Fields _RightStar_]

Thank you for releasing this long-awaited capability. I understand that it is a first step, but it a great leap forward for setting up queues and filters. 

[Steven McCoy]

Works great, thanks so much @April Chi for the terrific work and communication!

[Dave Mathijs]

To find your team’s ID:

1. Open the team’s profile page. The URL will look like:
   https://home.atlassian.com/o/<your-org-id>/people/team/<team-id>?<site-id>

2. Copy the <team-id> part from the URL and use it in your JQL: membersOf("id:<team-id>").

Really? Auto-fill on Team name should be the standard...

[Asha Goyal]

Thanks @April Chi 

It is Amazing!!!

[Chris Rainey]

Thank you @April Chi 

Question - with the automation piece, if the name of a team is updated, would we need to come and update the automation step that uses the team as well? Or would it continue to work as is?