Set up Jira automation to add a date/time field to Epic once a child has moved to "In Progress"

[Nate Ballantyne]

I need to add a new date/time field to an epic one any child issue has been moved to "in progress", this is only to be added once as it will be used to identify at what point in time work on an epic officially started.

I'm struggling putting a rule together for this so any help would be appreciated!

[Nate Ballantyne · Accepted solution]

This was actually a lot more straight forward than I thought! I'd like to also figure out how I can update all child issues retroactively.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Nate Ballantyne -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Well done answering your own question!  For your second question, what do you mean by:

I'd like to also figure out how I can update all child issues retroactively.

For example, do you want to:

1. update all existing epics which are not yet completed
2. update child issues of epics in some manner
3. something else?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Nate Ballantyne]

Hey Bill!

I mean for all epics that already have child issues that have already moved to “in progress”, (or could be completed) how do I capture the date that happened against an epic

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for clarifying, and this is really two problems to solve:

1. how to do that for child issues for which none are completed yet
2. how to do that for child issues for which at least one is completed already

For a scenario like this where one wants to retroactively set a field value, a scheduled trigger rule with JQL to scan the Epics (and their child issues) can help.  The rule can be enabled until all "caught up", and then disabled.

For #1 above, the rule could use the lookup issues action to gather the child issues which are "in progress" for the trigger epic, and then use the minimum value of the Status Category Changed Date.  For example with:

{{lookupIssues.statuscategorychangedate.toDate.min}}

Case #2 is a challenge, as the date / time when the first child issue moved to "in progress" is in the issue history, and that is not easily accessible by a rule.  I recommend not trying to solve that with automation rules and instead set those manually.

[Nate Ballantyne]

This is great, thank you! Will certainly be looking into the first one 😁