Bill Sheboy's Automation Concepts Series
This is not the greatest article in the world, no. This is just a tribute.[1]
(Updated with missing articles and cleaner HTML!)
Ever so modest Automation Expert @Bill Sheboy has quietly been amassing an amazing repository of articles on what he calls Automation Concepts. I find myself searching for these articles time and time again, so I figure I would start cataloging them here:
How to ask a community question…or not - April 27, 2024
TL; DR: Effectively asking a question helps get to better solutions, faster. Please try to...
Dynamic searches within a list - October 8, 2024
TL;DR: Many issues and their fields are lists of things. Sometimes we need to find specific items within a list. Knowing ways to find them saves rule-writers effort, time, and frustration. There are built-in rule features to help search or filter lists, yet those have limitations. Learning how to workaround some of the limitations can help.
Learning to write and use rules - December 22, 2024
TL; DR: Jira Automation rules help teams save time, automate repeatable tasks, reduce manual errors, and close some gaps in Jira features. Effectively using automation rules takes time, effort, learning, and a healthy degree of caution. If you want the benefits, you need to do the work!
I'm mad I never saw this. This is a terrific introduction to Automation rules.
Using Created Variables as Numbers - February 25, 2025
TL; DR: Using an automation Create Variable action temporarily stores information for later use. Those variables are string type values, and may be converted to other types such as date / times, lists of strings, JSON, and numbers. When a number is needed, the conversion is not always simple. Understanding how to convert a variable saves rule-writers time, frustration, and may help explain rule behaviors and errors not covered in the documentation.
Smart Values and Scope of Information - May 17, 2025
TL;DR: Several community questions ask about where in a rule a smart value has certain information, and misunderstandings may lead to rules with odd symptoms / defects when the rules execute. Understanding the scope of smart values in rules helps our learning to prevent such challenges.
Branching memory / resource limit can halt processing - June 3, 2025
TL;DR: Apparently, automation branches can exceed memory / resource limits and fail to process completely. Please read further to learn a workaround.
Find Overlaps Between Lists - June 16, 2025
TL;DR: The current smart value list functions do not provide a way to find common items between two different lists. You may solve that using a dynamic regular expression with the match() function.
Percentage Complete - August 21, 2025
TL;DR: Community members often ask how to calculate a percentage complete value, such as for an Epic's child items. This article outlines one approach using a single Lookup Work Items action, and potential challenges to manage with the rule.
Workarounds for Nested Branching - September 1, 2025
TL;DR: Simple rules (without advanced component features) do not support nested branching features yet. There are several possible workarounds, depending upon your specific scenario needs. Let's describe (but not implement) some workarounds, allowing you to consider them for further experimentation.
Randomly Selecting N Work Items - September 3, 2025
TL; DR: Let's find a random sample of work items, such as for an internal audit, from a lookup result set. There are many internet sources for spreadsheet tools to randomly sample. This article is not trying to replace those. Instead, we have an example of how a problem may be split into pieces and solved one chunk at a time.
Increment a Date While Skipping Holidays - November 18, 2025
TL; DR: When incrementing a date by business days, we may want to skip any holidays / non-working days. You could use an external service endpoint to do so. Or...let's build a rule to help solve it!
Testing Practices for Rule Writing - December 8, 2025
TL; DR: Let's cover testing basics for rule-writing to ensure you get the desired results and to save your team time in the future.
Sum or Synch Fields with Parent and Child Work Items - December 14, 2025
TL; DR: Jira has limited abilities to sum or synch a field with parent and child work items. Community members often ask about this need. Let's describe some sources to help and gotchas beyond the basics. Short answer: it may take several rules to solve this need based on your constraints.
Does disabling Allow Rule Trigger always work? - February 3, 2026
TL; DR: When a rule runs unexpectedly, check if "Allow Rule Trigger" is enabled and working as designed.
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I may have missed some. I blame Google. Or the late hour. @Bill Sheboy or others should feel free to add your "greatest hits" as a comment on this article.
In searching for these (and also working on my own latest challenge), I found this Bill Sheboy deep dive into an answer. I'm sure there are many many others:
How to iterate a list to find a matching item and its index with smartvalues - October 2023
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So, as always, thank you Bill for the amazing commitment you put in here. As I've told you many times, I wish you'd join us in Atlassian Champions so at the very least Atlassian could load you up with swag, and but even better maybe we'd get to meet you in person at a Team conference. But until then, I can just offer this tribute/catalog of just a little of your fine work!
[1] Tribute, by Tenacious D
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Darryl Lee
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