Actions Button Feature

[sekhar reddy]

Atlassian is making Jira administrators work life miserable now a days by making changes in the automation features.

In this year Atlassian made changes in the Issue view screen to show automation rules in by adding a new feature called Actions. When end users see this feature, they want to try using automation rules and it’s good that if they can make some progress on their work using automation, but this feature some disadvantages.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Jira-Cloud-automation-Manual-trigger-rules-are-moving/ba-p/2314046#M762

Self-status transitions will show under the Actions tab even though no manual automation rules are configured, if we add any self-transitions at workflow Jira admin must educate users where they can see self-transition. This is extra work for the admins apart from their regular work.

Users/Project Admins want to try using automation rules which lead to creating more automation rules in the project, on the other side Atlassian introduced new packaging model for Jira Cloud Automation. Which means, the more you are using you must upgrade your subscription simply to use the automation features.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Introducing-our-new-packaging-model-for-Jira-Cloud-Automation/ba-p/2446099

When this feature was introduced a suggestion request is raised to Atlassian and it has 357 votes within 7 months and so many comments from the users :https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-635

Recently they closed this ticket by stating that duplicate of another request which is nowhere related to original request : https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-114

When I raised a support request about this to Atlassian I got below response from them.

“So, I've forwarded your argumentation to the team, and this is all we can do. The team takes into consideration many factors when deciding on which features to implement, and you can read more about the process in this article. Please make sure to watch both issues, and if there's any message from the team about these issues, they will share it as a comment in the issues.”

It means simply they don’t want to disable this feature and their aim is to promote the automations. Automations are used when there is no feature available by default in Jira.

Now cloud administrators are suffering because of new packaging models to optimize automation usage or they must stop using the automations and user have to put manual efforts update their work. Else they must go for the next subscription model which is double their budget simply to use the automations.

By seeing all this changes by Atlassian I want to say one quote.

Greed drove the farmer and his wife to kill the duck and collect all the golden eggs. The farmer and his wife forgot that the duck only lays one egg. It was greed that masked their common sense. The Golden Egg Duck Story Moral is that greed destroys a man’s fortune.

This is just my opinion, please share your thoughts if something is offensive.

[Steve Rhodes]

So much effort has been put into encouraging users and admins to create automations and exposing these automations to end users inside the issue can now push the admin over the limits of their subscription. I have voted on AUTO-114 now that AUTO-635 has been (wrongly) closed.

[Anne Saunders]

I'm getting very nervous about November. Most of my users are content to let me administer automation rules, but I'm terrified now that single product automations will cost that one of my guys will build something they think is innocent that labels every issue in a project (e.g.) and we'll be screwed out of automations for the month.

[Trudy Claspill]

@Anne Saunders 

You can manage who has access to create and edit automation rules to limit who could potentially cause a problem. Until or unless you are confident that the people who have the access understand the ramifications, perhaps you should remove their access.

Note I am not stating any opinions about Atlassian's implementation of the rule execution counting changes, not about changes to the screen. I am only offering a suggestion about preemptively mitigating the rule execution counting risk, and investing in educating the people who have access.

[Keith Jones]

I have to agree - leveraging that real estate on the screen to put the automation actions really threw us for a loop. We have quite a few self-transitions that we use, and by not having the button visible we suddenly had users bypassing the system (e.g. creating a "new" defect rather than using the Defect button in the QA status). I don't mind having automations exposed in some way, but bundling them with the workflow actions was a bit of lazy work in my view. 

[William Wilson]

You will see that I've been saying the same for over a year now. Atlassian has gotten greedy. They continue to remove features from the core product in favor of commercialized "marketplace" solutions. They continue to ignore all the feedback from users I read in these forums. It's the beginning of their own self-destruction. 

Give it time, and people will transition away to other products.