How do I establish an automation flow upwards between subtasks, tasks, and epics?

[dlayna]

I am trying to establish an upward status automation between subtasks, tasks, and epics. I have been able to connect the subs and tasks, but the epics seem to be disconnected and do not respond to any automation filters.

My automation stops at tasks and does not carry on to the parent epic.

[Trudy P Claspill]

Hello @dlayna 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

To provide you with advice about your automation flow we need the following information:

1. A description of what you want your flow to do; i.e. when this even occurs then I want these actions to happen. Provide details.
2. Provide screen images show your entire flow so that we can see the current structure.
3. Provide screen images of the flow audit log for an instance where the flow executed but you did not get the results you wanted. Click all the > characters in the audit log entry to expand all the details.
4. Tell us what you expected to happen versus what you observed happening.
5. What is the scope of your rule? Does the scope include all the spaces that may be involved; i.e. Epics may be in a different space than the child items under some circumstances.

With that additional information we may be able to provide you with some advice or we may need to ask you some additional questions.

[Paul Glantschnig _Appfire_]

Hello @dlayna,

This usually comes down to one of two things, both easy to miss IMO.

First, a single rule can only climb one level. A branch to the parent runs actions on the task, but you can't nest another branch inside it to continue on to the epic. The usual pattern is two rules:

1. Rule 1: trigger on subtask status change, branch to Parent, transition the task.
2. Rule 2: trigger on task status change, branch to Parent, transition the epic. On Jira Cloud the epic is simply the task's parent, so the same branch type works at both levels.

Second, and this is the one that bites most people: by default, a rule will not run when the change was made by another automation rule. So even a correct Rule 2 stays silent when Rule 1 transitions the task. In Rule 2's rule details there is a setting to allow the rule to be triggered by other rule executions; switch that on and the chain carries through to the epic.

If both of those are already in place, the audit log of Rule 2 (with all entries expanded) will show whether it fired at all and where it bailed out.

Best, Paul

[Paul Glantschnig _Appfire_]

Following up on my earlier answer: if the underlying goal is mainly to see epic progress rather than to physically transition epics, there's a route with no rules to maintain at all.

If you're open to an app from the Atlassian Marketplace, e.g. JXL for Jira shows your epics, tasks, and subtasks as one expandable hierarchy and rolls status up each level automatically, as a live progress distribution per epic. Nothing gets written to the issues, so there's no rule chain that can break.

Disclosure: I'm on the team behind JXL.

Cheers, Paul