Automation to create a subtask and assign to a user chosen person

Question

I want to setup an automation that does the following:

When a user moves story from "In Progress" to "Review/Test", I want Jira to:

* Create a subtask in the Review/Test column called Review xxx, where xxx is the name of the task that was moved to Review/Test from In Progress
* Ideally, it would be nice to present the user with a list of names associated with the project so they can choose the reviewer for the subtask
* In addition, once they have chosen the name, then they should also be able to set the story points for the review

I believe the first part should be pretty easy but prompting the user with a person responsible and the number of points may be too difficult for Jira.

Any help would be appreciated.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

One problem is that at the point where you using the Move action the issue that is in focus is the trigger issue, not the newly created issue. To address that you need to use a For Each branch, selecting Related Issues / Most Recently Created Issue.

Next, if you want to add the issue to an Active Sprint on a Scrum board you need to use the Edit Issue action to edit the Sprint field. Then you can select "Active Sprint" from a specified board.

Paul Merrill_gqg90s · Answer

I've been fooling around with this for a couple of hours now, with not much luck. I've got it sort of working to a point. Here's the steps so far:

I can get the new story created in the backlog correctly but no matter what I've done so far I cannot get it to move from being a Backlog item to the current sprint.

I'm using the Move issue to board but it doesn't work. The basic question I have is really, how can I, via automation, move a newly created story from the backlog to the current sprint. There must be some function to do this???

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Paul Merrill

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The intention of Automation Rules is to execute without direct interaction with a user. Rules are triggered in response to an event, and then run to completion without displaying any screens in the UI. The only exception to this is a Manually Triggered rule, which can prompt the user for inputs after it is triggered but before it executes any other steps. Refer to this for more information about Manually triggered rules:

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-triggers/#Manual-trigger-from-issue

You could have an Automation rule that creates the issue and then sends an email to somebody to tell them they need to go to the new issue and add the story points and assignee.

You mentioned you want to create a subtask. Do you mean create a child issue under the issue that was transitioned? Subtasks are a special type of issue that cannot exist without another issue designated as their "parent", and typically story points are not assigned to such an issue (though many people do assign story points to subtasks).

You also mentioned creating that new issue in a specific column. A column represents one or more Statuses in which the issue may exist. Whether or not an issue can be created directly in that status depends on the workflow used by the type of issue created. You may have to instead create the issue in the first status specified by the workflow for that issue type, and then use additional steps in the automation rule to transition it to the desired status.