Automation (Jira & Studio) cannot target Sandbox environments critical gap for safe AI/Agent testing

[Kirk Acklin]

Hi Atlassian Community,

I'm running into what I believe is a significant gap in the automation platform, and I'd love to hear if others have experienced this and whether there's a known workaround or a fix on the roadmap.

The Situation

Our organization has a sandbox Atlassian site (yourorg-sandbox.atlassian.net) that we spun up specifically to safely test automations and Rovo AI agents before enabling them in production. This is exactly the responsible approach Atlassian recommends — test in sandbox, promote to production.

The Problem

When building an automation flow in Studio (or Jira Automation), the Jira project trigger dropdown only shows projects from the production site — even when Studio is accessed from the sandbox site URL. There is no way to scope a trigger to a sandbox Jira environment.

As a result:

When we enabled our flow for testing, it immediately fired on production tickets, not the sandbox tickets we created for testing.

The sandbox tickets were completely ignored.

We had no safe way to validate the Rovo Agent's behavior before it touched live customer data.

Why This Matters

This gap is especially critical now that Atlassian is pushing AI-powered automation (Rovo Agents in Studio flows). The stakes of an untested agent running on production tickets are much higher than a simple field-update automation. Teams need a safe, isolated environment to validate agent behavior before production rollout — and right now, that path doesn't exist cleanly.

What Would Help

Allow automation triggers (in both Jira Automation and Studio) to target projects from sandbox/non-production Atlassian sites within the same organization.

Or, provide a first-class "sandbox mode" for automation flows that prevents them from firing on production data while testing is in progress.

At minimum, document a supported testing path for Studio + Rovo Agent automations that doesn't require enabling flows in production.

Current Workarounds (None are ideal)

Using a label condition to scope which tickets the agent sees — functional but fragile and requires manual ticket tagging.

Keeping the flow disabled and testing manually — provides no real automation validation.

There is no way to point the trigger at the sandbox Jira project specifically.

Has anyone else hit this wall? Any workarounds that have worked well for your team? And Atlassian folks — is this on the roadmap?

Thanks in advance.

[Liz Tanner]

Hey @Kirk Acklin, happy to help! You don't need workarounds as much as some clarification and testing spaces available on your product pay-tier.

The sandboxes you are describing where you can create dev, testing, uat, preprod, etc. sandboxes is only available on the Premium and Enterprise plans. Here's a link to the documentation for what product plans have sandboxes available and for what apps; sending this link along in case you have "legacy" sandboxes (last paragraph).

Unfortunately, there is no workaround within your tenant. Since Jira automations, Rovo Studio, and Rovo AI work across org level, creating another site under your tenant just creates a 2nd live site; thus, it's working as designed by only executing on production. Production is your automation flows'/Studio's only source since the org context is shared.

But, you do have a solution! You can create a free Atlassian Cloud Dev Site by signing up here and/or free demo site for app dev/testing here. Since it sounds like you're automation testing, I'd start with the Atlassian Cloud Dev Site. But, both are free with the Dev Site including  Standard-tier Atlassian apps for free, and the demo site including Jira, Confluence and a few other apps at the Enterprise-level.

The dev and demo sites are decoupled from your tenant, so they're isolated from your prod tickets and data of your organization's instances. Copying your Jira Cloud and Jira Automations data to your dev/demo sites is easy enough too. The documentation for doing just that is linked here. Also, you can export your Jira Automations in JSONs and import them into your Dev/Demo sites by going to your Jira app>Settings cog (top right)>System>Global Automations, and then click on the three dots, top right, and select "Export Flows". Import those into your Jira Cloud Dev Site, and you should be set to dev, test, debug, etc.

I am a free-tier user who uses the dev and demo sites to test custom Forge Automations, scripts, multi-platform integrations, scheduled db updates, ETL pipelines, you name it. Your Dev Site has Rovo Studio, Jira, JSM, and a few others that you mentioned, so I hope it works as a solution! If you hit a snag or have et up questions, feel free to reach out to me!