Jira Automation to assign both Story & Sub-task to same person

Question

I have an automation set up to do the following:

* When a story transitions to a specific status,
* Assign the story to one person in a group of 6, round-robin style
* Create a sub-task, and assign it to that same person (using "copy from trigger work item")

The last step doesn't seem to work - even though the story is correctly assigned to someone, the sub-task always ends up unassigned.

Is this a known limitation of automation? What's the right workaround?

I added a 10 second pause inbetween the steps to try to fix it, but still no luck -- almost like Jira caches the information about the triggering work item when automation starts, and doesn't update it.

Trudy P Claspill · Accepted Answer

Hello @mstein

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

If your rule makes a change to an issue, as this one does to change the assignee of the trigger issue, and you want to reference that updated information later in your rule, then you should add a Re-fetch action after that change. Otherwise the rule may be using cached data for that issue rather than the new data from your changes.

Try adding a Re-fetch action after the Assign action and before the Create action.

Mikael Sandberg · Accepted Answer

Hi @mstein,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

You have to add a re-fetch component after you assign the story. When the automation triggers the assignee is empty and that is why the sub-task is unassigned. Even if you make changes to the work item in the automation you have to re-fetch the data in order to use it on related work items.