Automation Applying to Wrong Tickets

Question

Hi,

We use automation to assign tickets to different queues/teams.

When I'm on a ticket, and I back out of it and see a ticket that needs to be triaged, I'll use automation for it. But sometimes, it just applies the automation toward the ticket I was working on before, not the current one.

This is obviously a problem, as it ends up sending tickets to other teams that weren't supposed to go to them, and it can take a long time for them to come back to us. We have many tickets, so we won't notice one is missing, we'll just notice that we need to do the automation on the other ticket again and then move on.

How can this be fixed?

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello @Carlos Puente

that definitely sounds like the rule is acting on too broad a scope / wrong issue context.

From your description, I would say the most likely cause is that the automation is not really tied tightly enough to the currently opened ticket, so it ends up running against the previously selected issue instead. In Jira Cloud, that is usually caused by the trigger/context/JQL branch being too wide, not by the queue itself. Atlassian’s automation docs also distinguish clearly between rule trigger, scope, and branch context, so if one of those is broad, the action can hit an unintended issue.

To really see what is wrong, we would need to see the full automation rule:

trigger

conditions

branches

JQL, if any

actions

And I would also check the audit log, because that will show which issue the rule actually ran on.

In 99% of cases like this, the rule scope or issue selection is just set too broadly.

Without the automation screenshot/config, it is hard to say where exactly, but I would start there.

C.Faysal {CFcon} · Answer

100% agree with @Benjamin

To help narrow it down, could you clarify a few things?

* How are you triggering the automation? Is it a manual "Run rule" button on the issue, a transition button, or something else?
* Where exactly are you triggering it from? From the issue detail view or from a queue?
* Does the audit log (Project Settings > Automation > Audit log) confirm that the rule ran on the wrong issue, or are you inferring it from the outcome?

That'll help pinpoint whether this is a trigger timing issue, a rule config issue, or something else entirely.

Benjamin_tmh9yg · Answer

HI @Carlos Puente ,

In order to understandthe behavior, do you screenshot of how your automation get triggers. This would give insight on what is causing your current one your are working on instead of the one before. There has to be something that the automation detected that made it chose the work item.

-Ben