Notification as soon as there is a certain minimum number of tickets in a status

[Emilia Mehr]

Hi,

I have the status "Backlog" in my workflow. Here, all tickets are stored that are to be processed next.
With the large number of employees in this project, I would like to receive an email or notification as soon as the ticket count per employee goes below 4 tickets in the backlog.

Is this possible?
Thanks for the help

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Emilia Mehr -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

How many is a "large number of employees" and how many Jira issues are there in the project backlog?

If you have fewer than 100 Jira issues, you could create a notification using an automation for Jira rule.  If you have more than 100 issues, a rule cannot handle that scenario easily.

Inverting that, if you have fewer than 100 employees, it would still be possible to do this with an automation rule...although it might be difficult to maintain it (depending on where the list of people / Jira users is stored).  A simpler rule could assume everyone has at least one issue, and scans would show anyone who has less than your threshold number of items.

If neither of those fit, you may want to investigate exporting the issues for reporting in another tool or looking at the Atlassian Marketplace for reporting tailored to this type of workload balancing.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Emilia Mehr]

Hi @Bill Sheboy ,

Thanks for your answer!

There are currently 15 people working on the project, and the trend is increasing.
There are always about 60 tickets in the project backlog, so there are 4 tickets available for each employee in the backlog.
Now I would like to receive a notification as soon as there are less than 4 tickets in the backlog for an employee.
What would your automation rule look like?

Kind regards

Emilia

[Bill Sheboy]

First thing, using automation rules requires learning and experimentation.  I recommend trying to create your rule(s) to help you learn about this.

I wonder what you mean by "as soon as there are less than 4 tickets in the backlog for an employee".  That could mean a few things:

1. when an issue is completed, check the assigned persons remaining issue count, and send a notification if it is less than 4
2. when an issue is assigned, check both the current and previous assignee (if any) for their assigned count...
3. when an issue is created, ... (same as case #1)
4. and so forth...You will need to create your cases as you understand them best.

Let's walkthrough case #1 to see what the rule would look like:

• trigger: issue transitioned to Done (or whatever your done status is)
• condition: assignee is not empty (This prevents checking unassigned issues.)
• action: lookup issues, with JQL to find the other issues assigned to the same person

project = insertYourProjectName
 AND assignee = {{triggerIssue.assignee.accountId}}
 AND status = Backlog

• advanced compare condition
  • first value: {{lookupIssues.size|0}}
  • condition: less than
  • second value: 4
• action: send yourself an email indicating the person {{lookupIssues.first.assignee.displayName}} only has {{lookupIssues.size|0}} issues assigned

To help get you started on creating your rule, please refer to these documentation and example sources: 

• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/automation/overview#what-is-automation
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/rule-list?systemLabelId=all&page=1&pageSize=20&sortKey=name&sortOrder=ASC
• https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/
• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/use-advanced-search-with-jira-query-language-jql/

[Emilia Mehr]

Thank you @Bill Sheboy

The first case was exactly what I was looking for.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi, Emilia.  Did the example I provided help to solve this for you?