How can I make changes to the (old) parent of a Sub-task converted to a Task?

Question

Hey guys,

I'm trying to set up an automation to help with the following issue:

* We have an automation that sums the Story Points of the Sub-tasks in a Story whenever one of the Sub-tasks' Story Points field is edited. This works well but...
* If a Sub-task of a Story is converted to an issue, no edit was done in "a Sub-task of the Story" and the automation isn't triggered.
* The Story's Story Points field still holds the same value as previously, before one of the Sub-tasks was converted to an issue, though the actual sum of Story Points among its Sub-tasks is now lower than before.
* My goal: when a Sub-task is converted to a non-Sub-task issue (most commonly a Task), trigger an automation to sum the Story Points in the parent the task had before conversion, a sum which should now be reduced compared to before.

I've tried going at it with:

* Using the changelog smart value, though without much success. Can't really find any good documentation on how to use it.
* Making an automation triggered by changes to the parent Story, though it seems that removing a Sub-task doesn't count as an edit to the parent.

Have anyone made a similar automation with success? Or has any other ideas on what I might try?

Big thanks!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Thanks, Jakob.  I just found this open defect that Move Trigger does not fire for this scenario: https://codebarrel.atlassian.net/browse/AUT-2161

unknown · Answer

Thanks for your suggestion Bill. The Issue Moved trigger didn't fire however, and none of the other things I tried did either. I decided to instead just add a manual trigger to sum the Story Points, as well as having an automation do it for any edit to the Story, which should suffice for our situation.

If a trigger ever is added for when an issue is converted, I'll be back at it :)

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @[deleted]

First thing, I find putting story points at the sub-task level seems both different than the intent of using sub-tasks (i.e. non-releasable child items which contribute to building a releasable thing, such as a story) and to create busy work to gather the measures later for team use.  With that out of the way...

Perhaps check if the Issue Moved trigger is fired when the subtask changes issue type, and if so, then use the changelog to find the parent story and modify it (e.g. a comment) to trigger a different rule to refresh the original parent's data.

Kind regards,
Bill