Jira Backlog Automated Prioritisation

[Jeanne-Mari Benn]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to automate the prioritisation of our Jira backlog WITHOUT using Foxly. 

I have been playing around with the automation rules and custom fields but have not found a way to make it work.

Any suggestions?

[Fabio Ignacio]

We came up with a solution at our site that worked quite well with custom fields, Automation and Smart Values. You can change the automation trigger to your liking, but a Score is set to the ticket according to different initial inputs and it's triggered manually.

The example below is grabbing the value of three custom fields and calculating the average, pretty simple, but you can customize however you like with smart values. 

I even tested the response in different types of custom fields to make sure it worked

The fields in this example are a Single Select List going from 1 to 5.

{{#=}} ({{issue.customField_16702.value}} + {{issue.customField_16703.value}} + {{issue.customField_14700}}) / 3 {{/}}

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-math-expressions/

[Fabio Ignacio]

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Jeanne-Mari Benn -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

What would automated prioritization look like to you?  How would it work relative to any manual prioritization?

The default sort for a backlog / board filter is ORDER BY Rank ASC.  When that is used, the manual drag-and-drop to change rank / order words.  Any other ordering prevents that.

It is possible to update the Rank of an issue, relative to another issue, using the REST API functions and the automation action of Send Web Request.  Although that may not help if you mean order-changing based on something other than ranking.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Jeanne-Mari Benn]

Hi Bill,

Thank you for your response.

We want to try move away from manual prioritisation, if possible. For example, dragging the highest priority stories to the top of the backlog. 

I was hoping to use the "Priority" field and a custom field for "Priority rating" in an automation rule to organise our backlog from high to low priority. But so far that plan is not working very well. I cannot find the automation rule components to build a rule like that.

[Bill Sheboy]

The ORDER BY for the board filter could be changed to sort as you wish.  For example,

project = myProjectName ORDER BY yourCustomField ASC

Then any changes to the field(s) would be reflected in the order of display.

What would you expect the automation rule to do?  Is it calculating the value of your "Priority Rating" field?

In that case, if you can define the algorithm to set the field, based on other issue data, that may be possible.

[Jeanne-Mari Benn]

I guess I could just sort on the custom field. If we rated the priority of the Jira issue from 1-10. (10 being highest priority), then hopefully the ORDER BY could sort it from highest to lowest priority and vice versa. It will be more granular than sort with the Priority field that will have 40 tickets all with a priority of high. 

[Bill Sheboy]

If 10 is highest-priority then you would want to use this for the sort:

project = myProjectName ORDER BY yourCustomField DESC

You may added more criteria, to sort by progressively more fields, as needed:

project = myProjectName ORDER BY yourCustomFieldA DESC, yourCustomFieldB ASC

[John McCann]

I've put this somewhere else previously, but what would be super helpful:

Scenario

1) Sprint has started (users are working on 3-4 epics across different modules)

2) In Flight issue/bug comes up from testing

3) Bug is assigned to the developer for their highest priority Epic

4) I have to go to the backlog manually, select the developer, and manually reorder their sprint each time (the issue is always added at the bottom of the backlog)

We try to keep these types of issues to a minimum,m and they get a 'Not_planned' label automatically...

What would be great

An option (or automation) when a developer is assigned a new issue in the current sprint so that it is ordered at the bottom of the existing issues for the same epic

Does anyone know how to do this?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @John McCann -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

As this is an older thread, I recommend creating a new question, and perhaps adding a link back to this one.  That will ensure the maximum number of people see it to offer suggestions.

When you post your question, please describe:

• How prioritization happens for your backlog.  That is, are you using the default of ORDER BY Rank ASC
• And, should the new issue be assigned to the next future sprint, or something else

In either case, I hypothesize an automation rule could be created to re-rank or move the issue to the correct sprint.  For both cases, the rule would likely need to call the Jira REST API endpoints with the Send Web Request action: the first case would be to re-rank the issue and the other would be to identify the sprint to which the issue is added.

Kind regards,
Bill