Is it possible to set up automation to change a field of multiple work items at once?

ckopanon

This might be a tough question to write out...

 

So we have a status called Prioritization. Every work item in this status has a priority number field listed. For this example, lets just say we have 3 work items:

• Work item 1: Priority = 1
• Work item 2: Priority = 2
• Work item 3: Priority = 3

What we would like to happen is when one of these work items is transitioned to the next status (lets say the next status is In Progress), it changes the priority like so:

• Work item 1: transitioned to In Progress
• Work item 2: Priority = 1
• Work item 3: Priority = 2

Is this possible through automation and if so what would that look like?

Bill Sheboy

Hi @ckopanon 

This might be possible, given some assumptions:

1. there are fewer than 100 work items in the "Prioritization" status
2. there are well-defined criteria of the "Priority" transition values
3. there are no dependencies for the value of "Priority" between different work items
4. you do not care if this gets broken / delayed when there is an Atlassian outage which prevents rules from running / catching up after the outage concludes
5. your question indicates you are on a Premium license level, and thus you have confirmed with your Site / Product Admin there is sufficient automation usage for this rule to work
6. people do not manually change the "Priority" values, breaking the automated updates
7. people do not accidentally transition a work item to "In Progress"

If those are all valid assumptions, a rule could:

• trigger on the transition,
• find and branch to the work items with JQL,
• update their "Priority" value.

Kind regards,
Bill