Story points updates created by automation not resulting in another automation triggering

[Dominic Douglas]

These are the two rules that I run:

One that makes sure all subtask points are added to the parent (works well)

e.g. If sub task of user story or task - then the task gets the total number of points below

One that totals the number of story points of work items in a feature (excluding sub-tasks). 

When the value of tasks or user stories is updated by the first automation, the second one that updates the feature points doesn't recognise that there is a change that should trigger the automation.

However, if the SP value of the user story is updated manually then the feature story points works well.

What is causing the story points that are added automatically not being recognised as a When that should start the automation?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Dominic Douglas -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding to the other suggestions provided, and assuming you are using a company-managed project...

Since the Atlassian change to consistently use the parent field to link parent / child work items, only one rule is needed for this scenario.  When a child is updated, it will update its parent, and that in turn will trigger the rule again to update its own parent.  This will work because there are always fewer than 10 hierarchy levels in Jira (which is the automation looping limit).

And, please note well: your rule only handles one possible case of a field change.  You will need additional rules if you want the Story Points to be more accurately tracked as a sum.  For example, those scenarios include at least:

1. when the story points change, update the parent, grandparent... (This is your scenario.)
2. when a work item is created with a parent, update the parent, grandparent...
3. when a work item is deleted, update the previous parent
4. when a work item is added to a parent, update the parent
5. when a work item is removed from a parent, update the previous parent
6. when a work item is moved to a different parent, update both parents
7. when a work item changes type such that it no longer has a parent, update the previous parent
8. when a person manually changes / overrides the story points of a work item at the top of the hierarchy (e.g., an Epic), re-calculate the value for the child items
9. when Atlassian has an outage preventing rules from running, there is no clear information about which rules will run later to "catch up", and the mitigation for this is to create a scheduled trigger rule to "walk" each level to perform the updates at the lowest parent level, thus triggering your original rule.
10. when automation limits are exceeded, the update rules may halt running; please discuss with your Site / Product Admin if this happens
11. etc.

Some of these can be combined for rules, such as 4, 5, and 6.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Dominic Douglas 

Welcome to the community.

Have you set the checkbos on the option;

"Check to allow other rule actions to trigger this rule. Only enable this if you need this rule to execute in response to another rule"

In the rule details section of the automation rule?

[Valerie Knapp]

Great minds @Marc - Devoteam !

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Dominic Douglas , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your post.

Thanks for sharing the rules. Please can you also share the audit log where it hasn't worked? Is it that the rule is being triggered but nothing is updated?

I wanted to ask as well, on the Rule details tab, do you have this box ticked?

This might also explain why the rule isn't working as expected.

Please can you have a look and share some of this information I requested?

Thanks and best wishes