How to automate assigning a new issue to a specific team's current sprint?

Anastasiya Lebedev

Hi all,

We have multiple teams working with the same board and the same projects with concurrent sprints running at the same time. 

To improve documentation compliance, I would like to automate the bit of issue creation that would automatically allocate a bug ticket created by a team member to that team's current sprint.  I'm a bit at a loss at how to do it. 

Right now the splitting into teams isn't even done by assigning the developers to groups (which I'm guessing might help), and the sprints have names that indicate what team they belong to, but that's it.  Can Jira check whether ticket creator is in a particular group and then allocate that ticket to a current sprint with a name starting with a particular string? Or is there a better way?

I can't find a way to pass on the sprint name in the Jira Slack integration guide (creating a new Jira ticket with a command in Slack, which would also help). Any other ideas?

Thanks bunches in advance!

 

Andy Heinzer

Automation can be used to set the Sprint field of an issue.  However within Automation, there currently is not a good means to differentiate between the multiple possible sprints that could exist on a board.  When using the action Edit Field, choosing the Sprint field, the options provided will include either the Active or Future planned sprint of every board available to that rule. 

In the case of a project specific automation rule, this shows multiple entries when parallel sprints are enabled, like so:

In my test instance, the board (Scrum rank2) has two active sprints right now, but automation isn't being very clear as to which is which here.  You can't see the name of either sprint here. 

Hence I don't think that automation is going to be able to easily set the sprint value here in the manner you suggested.

 

That said, it might still be possible to use automation to set the sprint a manner that it applies to a specific group of users, but in my suggested approach, this would require you to segment these teams into each their own board.  It could remain all within the same project, but having a separate board for each team could then at least allow you to assign to the active sprint of that team.  How this separation would work depends upon having some kind of field that clearly identifies that issue as belonging to that team.  If you can do that, then we should be able to setup a JQL filter to only select those issues.  Once you can do that, you can save that filter and then create a new board for that filter (presuming this a company managed project, as team managed projects don't currently let you configure the JQL filter for that board).

You could still maintain a board that contains all the issues from all these teams, but right now, in order to make automation able to accurately set an issue into the active sprint of a team, it needs that to be the only active sprint on that board in question.  Setting up a new board that only contains issues from that active sprint (and not any issues in a different sprint) could then help you to be able to create an automation rule here that could do this.

Does this help?

Andy