How to use Automation to Schedule a Release and Release them on a schedule

[April.Chin]

Hi Jira People

I have been trying to schedule our releases for our team using Kanban. We are not a software team and there is no code being released that being said I would like to do the following

1. every 2 weeks
2. create a release
   1. use the naming convention of "Project Name + StartDate_EndDate"
3. add all tickets that are in the status of "Accepted" to the release
4. then release these to clear the board of accepted tickets

I've read through a lot of documentation and I'm unclear of where I need to go after I create the release.

Screen shot of attempted rule

I know I'm probably missing some steps but if someone could clearly define the process I think it would help a lot of people out. 

Thank you,

April

[Kalyan Sattaluri · Accepted solution]

EDIT - I should have done due diligence.

@April.Chin  - Please see @Trudy Claspill 's comment

[April.Chin]

Hi thank you for the detailed response which isn't showing up in the ticket. I tried to set up everything as you suggested but a couple of things are happening

1. 3 Releases are being created. I'm not sure why this is. I only have one create version step, and there are no other rules created in this project.

2. It then can't find the smart value 

3. It then fails to release. I'm including my rule along with a picture of the audit

[Kalyan Sattaluri]

@April.Chin   *hugs*

Turns out this rule is more complicated to set up than it appears. 

I am going to suggest an approach which I think is the simplest to implement and you let me know if it makes sense.

It will require us to set up 2 rules. so lets start fresh.

Create new Rule, rule # 1, which runs every other Tuesday at morning (9 AM) and will just edit fields with fixversion (See below). It does nothing else at this time.

So Rule 1 -

• Scheduled to run every 2 weeks, on a Tuesday at 9 AM with JQL (same as you have right now)
• It will edit fixversion of all issues it finds. Thats it. Your rule will look like below.

Rule 2:

Rule 2 runs every other tuesday at evenings and will release next version and create new version. thats it.

Couple of things to note:

Use same JQL as you already have, use same logic to create version.

Set up the rule for Tuesday so tomorrow morning, rule 1 should edit issues, and tomorrow evening, rule 2 will release version and also create a new one.

To start with, create a version manually so the rule can get started.

Please do all these steps, share screenshots of the 2 rules, create a version manually for the first time, lets wait till tomorrow evening and confirm its going to work go forward.

[April.Chin]

@Kalyan Sattaluri thanks for the help and advice. This did work for the most part. I did have 229 stories to release and only 200 got released. I'm not sure why the last 29 didn't release. Typically we wouldn't be releasing that many stories at once, but we just moved from a different software to Jira so I'm just getting to know how everything works. I will wait 2 weeks to see if these last 29 issues go with the newer ones. We typically do around 40 issues every 2 weeks so I'm hoping this was just a capacity thing with Jira.

Thank you so much for taking the time to work through this with me. I really appreciate it. I'll update if it continues to be an issue with the 29 issues not being picked up.

[Kalyan Sattaluri]

Yes please let me know if it picks up in next run. I will also check in the mean time. Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @April.Chin 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

This same topic is discussed in this post:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-to-create-and-release-version-using-Jira-Automation/qaq-p/2568966

Pay particular attention to the response by @Bill Sheboy concerning the parallel execution of branches.

[April.Chin]

I read this and didn't understand it and I tried googling for the parts I didn't understand and didn't have much luck which is why I asked for a more dumbed down version.

• • use lookup issues with JQL to find the issues to update, and to identify the total issue count with {{lookupIssues.size|0}} - I made the query but I don't know how to add this portion to the JQL I looked up how to add a smart tag to JQL but it says that the smart tag has to be valid. either way when I use it I can no longer validate the JQL so some additional clarity on this step would be super helpful.
  • branch over the lookup issues
    • assign them to the new version...and add a comment including the name of the version and the total issue count
    • I don't know how to assign them to a new version I selected branch for current version and then do I choose edit the issue is that how this is assigned? Some clarity on how to assign and add the "comment including the name of the version and total issue count" would be super helpful. Picture or description of which components in automation to use and which fields to populate.
• Rule B, is triggered on the adding of the comment in the particular format with your data from above  (This rule would enable the option "Allow Rule Trigger" so the first rule's actions can start it.) I don't see an option to allow rule trigger so if you could let me know which component this?
  • this rule checks, with a lookup issues action, if all of the issues have been assigned to the version
  • only after that has occurred would the version release