What would make it easier for you to create and manage Automation rules?

[#1]

Hi everyone,

@Michael Fedulov and I are Product Managers working with the Atlassian Automation team, and we'd love to hear how you're finding the experience of creating and managing Automation rules - how you find this today, any pain points you've found, and what improvements you'd like to see.

If you're keen to chat with us, feel free to find a time that suits here: 
https://calendly.com/cgavey/automation-feedback

Look forward to hearing from you!

Charlie

[Masayuki Abe]

@Charlie Gavey 

Hi,

Since it is difficult to attend the MTG, two suggestions are noted here.

1,We propose to enhance the search function.

Search items: owner, enable/disable, name of rule.

We have over 1400 automated rules on our site. We regularly delete automated rules that are no longer used by the site administrator.

However, we are having a hard time finding unwanted automation rules because we have to check all pages to find them.

2. Fixed a bug that when searching for the name of an automation rule in multibyte characters, it moves to the "Library" tab.

[Tim C]

Hi @Charlie Gavey@Michael Fedulov 

RE: Exporting & Importing automation rules:

I know that the "Labels" as applied to automation rules are included in the exported JSON file (as IDs). 

I'd recommend that it would be useful to have Labels "Names" included in the export (not just IDs).

If so, then the rule importing process could use these names when creating the new rules (matching them against any existing Labels and ideally creating any new labels which don't already exist).

When you've got loads of automation rules which are nicely categorized into batches - it's annoying to manual map the imported ones again.

[Suzanne Stenson O_Brien]

Is there a way to trigger a rule to run "now"?

[Tim C]

@Suzanne Stenson O_Brien - To allow a rule to run "now" - I'd suggest giving the rule a "manual trigger" event and assign trigger to a specific group of users (if needed) - then those users will get an action button (near workflow one) to immediately trigger the associated rules (assuming you're on cloud). Hope this gives an answer for what you need?

[Suzanne Stenson O_Brien]

@Tim C thank you! Great suggestion.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Charlie Gavey and rule writers!

Often I have already solved a problem with a rule, and I cannot find my existing/example rule from which to mine the ideas for reuse.  What if we had better search capabilities to query the actions, smart values, component text, etc. used in a rule, and then list the results found, with a selection to open the rule for edit?

What if we could more easily document rules?  Perhaps a ... menu action from the rules list to generate a Confluence page for a rule (linked back to it, of course :^) and the page could then be annotated with more information...

Or better still, what if beyond the 65 component limit of rules, we could add annotations/comments to explain a rule, without the need to expand each action to understand it?

What if in the audit log details for a rule execution, a hover text could display the details of the component which lead to the log entry?  For complex rules, I often find myself going back and forth between the rule and audit log to discern cause/results.  Seeing them together would accelerate troubleshooting.

What if I could select and compare two different audit log details, from different rule executions?  This would allow me to better consider the impact of a recent change.

What if there was a verbose option for audit logging, to show all issues and values impacted by the rule?  When there are many items to process, the log is truncated to entries ending in an ellipses, and more conditions/audit log writes are needed to diagnose some issues.

What if rule changes were versioned, allowing me to rollback a change that did not work as I expected, to an earlier saved version?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Alongside everything else, what Bill said about versions:

What if rule changes were versioned, allowing me to rollback a change that did not work as I expected, to an earlier saved version?

This would be actually really helpful as we have multiple people sometimes working on/updating the rules.

[John Funk]

Also echoing Bill's comments and others.

Definitely need a better search function, especially by date.

Need a way to identify the exact rule that was executed that caused an action to happen. IOW, each rule should have an ID, then in the History of the Issue, it should denote which Rule ID  was the one that fired to cause that change to the history (i.e. the update). 

Need the ability to delay executions.

It would be great if you could validate queries that include smart values like you can for pure JQL.

Incorporate AI into the process like what is planned for JQL queries. It would be nice to tell the tool what you would like in simple terms and it would create it. 

[Fabian Lim]

The ability to put notes in the if-else statements.  In a lot of automations we use complex JQL conditions and it's hard to determine what each condition is checking unless you open up the details.  A simple description can be helpful to determine what you need to modify. 

The log action should have more than 1 line.  Sometimes you want to print various lines of smart values, etc.  I end up use add comments instead.

[John Funk]

Oh, and most certainly the ability to have a combined trigger that incorporates at least one condition (multiple would be even better!). For example, not just a trigger for for Issue Created but a trigger for Issue Created for Issue Type Epic. Or Field Value Changed for Due Date for Issue Type = Epic and Custom field 1 value of Yes and Custom field 2 value for XYZ. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Yes, and...to John's suggestion: that would help customers impacted by global rule, execution limits for such rules with the issue created trigger. 

Although...it would require fixing the race condition which appears to exist between the Issue Created trigger and the availability of new issue data to rules.  Otherwise the rule may/may not trigger correctly.

[Becky]

A search bar in audit logs where we can search by Id, dates and issues key. 

Monitoring beeing made with issues, Implement a solution when a rule log return some error and it creates an issue in a service desk, so multiple analyst can document and fix the error,