Setting a Task to Blocks/Is Blocked by

[Bryan Henderson]

After setting Tasks/Stories to these values, is there a way to prevent the blocked Task (Task A) from being completed until after the Task that is set to block (Blocks - Task B) is completed?

B blocks A from being completed until B is completed first.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Bryan Henderson 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Are you working with issues in a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project?

There is not a native method to set a Condition on a transition to prevent a transition being available based on the status of linked issues, nor a method to add a Validator to complete the transition in that case.

You could potentially use a separate custom field to keep track if an issue has a blocking issue that is not complete, and then use a Condition or Validator to prevent the transition based on that custom field.

You would use Automation Rules to evaluate if the issue had "blocked by" issue links and check the status of those linked issues, then set the custom field based on that.

[Bryan Henderson]

I work with a "Company Managed" project, so what you are saying is that it is possible to do a validation step, but it would need to be a process (created in-house) that would validate if an added field is either true or false to determine if the Task that blocks another task has been completed, is this how I understand your response?

[Trudy Claspill]

Essentially, yes.

The "process (created in-house)" would be the use of the native Automation Rules feature to evaluate if there are issues linked as "is blocked by" that are incomplete. That Automation rule would set a custom field in the blocked issue to a specified value.

In the Workflow Transition you would add a Condition to make the transition unavailable if that field was set to that specified value, or you would add a Validator so that the transition could be selected but would not be able to be completed when that field was set to that specified value.

[Maciej Dudziak _Forgappify_]

Hi @Bryan Henderson 

If I may, I would propose an alternative solution; however, it would require an app.

If you are looking for a ready-to-use solution. We've developed the Linked Issues Validator available as part of the Workflow Building Blocks for Jira app. It is a wizard-like validator in which you can choose relations between tasks to be validated, just like in your case. Additionally, you can filter relations by issue types and select criteria based on status category and status.

I am leaving a link to the app's documentation if you are interested.

I hope it will help.

Cheers