Parent move to In Progress when 1 of 3 children move to In Progress

[deseymour]

I have an automation set to move a parent to In Progress when the first of it's children is moved to In Progress. However, for some reason, it is not moving the parent until ALL the children are In Progress. I have attached a screenshot of the automation. Any ideas what I did wrong?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @deseymour 

Your rule is missing a few things for the scenario:

1. checking the children's status (which is only partially handled by the trigger),
2. not moving the parent when it is already further in the workflow, and
3. it does not handle possible other ways children could be "In Progress", thus requiring additional rules.  (e.g., adding an already "In Progress" child to a parent)

The #1 part may be done (with some risk) using the Related Work Items condition or (very safely) using the Lookup Work Items action and a Smart Values condition.  The risky part of the first condition type is I have observed inconsistent accuracy with it.

Perhaps try something like this:

• trigger: work item transitioned...to "In Progress"
• branch: to Parent
  • condition: status is not "In Progress"...or a later stage in your workflow
  • action: lookup work items, with JQL to gather child work items of the parent which are "In Progress"
  • smart values condition: check if {{lookupIssues.size|0}} is greater than 0
  • action: transition to "In Progress"

You may want other rules for the #3 thing I noted above.

One more recommendation: I recognize why teams might use rules like this to have the children drag / push their parent through flow (e.g., Stories and Epics).  Please take the time to map out the the different cases for the scenario to ensure your rule(s) handle the cases.

Kind regards,
Bill

[deseymour]

I don't understand #3 above. What is an issue size??

[Bill Sheboy]

Size is a list function to return the number of items in the list:

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-lists/#list.size

Also, please check your workflow for any validators as the other suggestions have offered.  Thanks!

[deseymour]

OK, it appears to be working now. I'm really not sure why it worked this time. The only change I made was for it to check if the task was In Progress, Review, On Hold, or Complete instead of only In Progress. Thanks for your help. 

[Evgenii · Accepted solution]

Hi, @deseymour 

Rule looks correct, what do you see in audit log, when rule triggers? Maybe there is error text, which can help with debug?

Or maybe there is condition or validator, that prohibits transition?

[deseymour]

There isn't an error log as the rule doesn't trigger until the last subtask is moved to In Progress. 

[Evgenii]

It happens today, or it happened earlier?

If it happens today, I think, it can be linked with active incident:

Degraded performance of Jira automations

https://jira-software.status.atlassian.com/incidents/4drnxvxspl0g

[Shalini Pradhan · Accepted solution]

Hello @deseymour ,

Good day! Welcome to Atlassian community :)

The Automation rule looks correct. There is a possibility that there is either a validator or condition on the parent's workflow transition, which is blocking the automation rule.

Can you navigate to your parent's workflow ->  edit the workflow for the parent issue type -> look at the transition to "In Progress" and check for any validators or conditions (like "All sub-tasks must have status X") and if yes, remove them, publish the workflow and then see if automation works or not