Exporting Automation to Turn into a Narrative

Question

Now that we are moving our processes into Jira, I would love to stop having to maintain both Jira and an external Word doc each time a step changes.  I can export my automation to .json, into notebook, then see I could eventually turn it into an Excel document most likely.  Has anyone found a fast way to run a report that provides you with all the details from the automations (all the summaries, descriptions, smart tasks, etc. for each subtask)?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Thanks for clarifying, Sarah.

Unfortunately there is no public REST API to manage automation rules yet.  Here are a couple of suggestions for that capability, which you may watch / vote for to see progress:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-51
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JIRAAUTOSERVER-229

While we wait for that to happen... :^)

You may search and find some posts in the community where people tried to perform change management and documentation for rules, all of which involve manual steps currently.  Some things I have seen included:

* Create a defined process to develop, review, test, and maintain rules.  For example, using test projects (or sites) to mitigate risk to production projects, peer review of rules, etc..
* Regularly export and save rules in some change management / source control tool.  I recall some are using test automation tools to perform this action as they can script driving the Jira UX.
* Document rules purpose and changes, such as in a Confluence wiki
* Create an exception process to manage rule engine failure and infrastructure outages.  IMHO, this may be needed more for Cloud and Data Center users, as when there are outages customers have no control / visibility to "catch up" rules that did not run when expected.
* Create onboarding / training materials to help new users who inherit or create automation rules for projects

Sarah Edell · Answer

Sure, Bill.  In the old days, we had paper process guides/checklists.  Now, we have converted them to Jira tasks, subtasks, with automation and workflow.  But managers and auditors still want a tangible thing they can read to understand what our processes and flows are.  They don't want to go into Jira to click into each thing and try to figure it out.  So I would like to be able to export my automations of tasks and subtasks in a somewhat narrative format.  I do not want to have to maintain Jira and an external document.  I want to be able to make a change in Jira, export the whole process again, and have the most updated process chart.  Then, next week, we decide to tweak process, so I tweak some subtasks, validation rules, etc., and do another export to immediately have a new version of the process chart to hand to manager X or auditor Y.  Does this help?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Sarah Edell

I am unclear what you are asking; you mention both exporting automation rules and then details from issues like subtasks.

Would you please clarify: what problem are you trying to solve?  That is, "why"?  Knowing that may help the community to offer suggestions.  Thanks!

Kind regards,
Bill