Create Variables - ability to overwrite the variable

[Arkadiusz Inglot]

Hello,

I am Arkadiusz, Jira Administrator with more than 4 years of experience in building, designing and creating projects, workflows and complex business related automation rules using Jira Automation.

The topic I would like to raise is the ability to overwrite a variable declared inside the automation rule.

Until yesterday (05.05.2026) Create Variable could be defined at top of the automation rule, making the variable acessible from anywhere inside the rule.

Allowing you to writeout the variable directly below, inside the IF block or any Branch block.

The flexibility designed some sort of "variable scoping":

* Declaring variable at the top - global variable.

* Declaring variable inside IF block - local variable (accessible only inside that IF block).

Based on that functionality, you could create a global variable and overwrite it using If block with desired value, used later in the automation body (again outside of IF block).

I made a lot of rules like that allowing me to create some sort of validation process based on Business requirements.

For example:

1. Create Variable {{varTest}} at top of the rule with initial value, for ex. "null" (string 'null')

2. IF true then {{varTest}} => A

3. Log action: {{varTest}} => A (outside of IF block, returns A)

4. IF {{varTest}} equals ^(A)$ then sendEmail(to: {{varTest}})

As this example is pure basic, I made a lot of user validation once some of them are raising the request as well as corelating it with different - already created tickets (Branching to different project/work item).

Now it seems, that Atlassian made some change and Create Variables are not being overwritten:

1. Create Variable {{varTest}} at top of the rule with initial value, for ex. "null" (string 'null')

2. IF true then {{varTest}} => A

3. Log action: {{varTest}} => null (outside of IF block, returns null)

4. IF {{varTest}} equals ^(A)$ then sendEmail(to: {{varTest}}) (fails as variable was not overwritten).

This hugely impacts the core logic of any automation rule using Create Variable action.

Due to my concerns Ive already raised the ticket to Atlassian.

Despite that I would like you - if you did use the overwriting variable that way? Do you feel such changes should be annouced (if made intensionally)?

[Evgenii]

Hi, @Arkadiusz Inglot 

I checked Automations, because I often use the same logic, in my rules, but it seems everything works fine. Variable name is overwritten in IF branches.

[Arkadiusz Inglot]

Thank you for your message!

That gives me a hope, that its more related to some sort of bug rather than a change.

[Evgenii]

I don't see related incident. Maybe it's worth to write a ticket to support, that something wrong with Automations. 
I saw today post, that people got problems with automations, which worked earlier. 

[Arkadiusz Inglot]

Ive created a ticket before this article.

Indeed, seems to be a bug:

Hello Arkadiusz,

Thank you for your candid feedback and for clarifying the urgency of this situation. I completely understand your point

Update on Investigation: Internal Incident Raised

I want to inform you that we have received similar reports from other customers over the last 24 hours regarding this exact change in variable scoping behavior. After analyzing the pattern and confirming that this has indeed broken existing automation rules that were previously working, we have raised an internal incident with our engineering team.

Our developers are currently debugging and triaging this as a high-priority regression to understand what changed in the automation engine's handling of variables across blocks.

 At least they are awere and working on it. Fingers crossed!

[Arkadiusz Inglot]