Automation - Slack notifications to a list of users

[Georges DURAND]

Hello everyone.

I would like to thanks in advance to all the people that will read this question, even more those who will help me.

I'm trying to improve the workflow on my team.
We're using JIRA Automation and Slack to communicate.

My team is divided like this :
- 3 front-end developers
- 2 back-end developers
- 1 ProductManager

The goal would be to notify to the right people for a task on slack.

If a front-end task reach the CodeReview JIRA column, then all the others front-end developers receiv a slack notification.
The same for the back-end developers.
When a task (back or front) reach the ToTest JIRA column, then it is the Product Manager that is pinged.

So after few hours, i got into some trouble, ahah !

1) How create a group/list of users to distinguish front dev, back dev and the PM in JIRA ?

2) How to notify on Slack severals person but not the task's responsable ?

3) How to notify severals persons that a ticket has been updated ?

Thank you everyone

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @Georges DURAND ,

We've put out a script to help connect Jira users with their Slack accounts (and help you mention them in an Automation message to Slack). Check out the script and instructions for use here! 

In addition to the methods @Bill Sheboy mentioned, you could also consider using a multi-user picker field. Using a smart value for the multi-user picker , you could pick up multiple users' Slack mentions in a rule. This field would need to be set either by hand or an Automation rule for each issue you were interested in using it on, but you could get "the right people" notified automatically with some clever rule-setting.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Chris Buzon]

There are probably a couple of ways you could do this.

My suggestion would be to create 3 slack channels (1 for each group), and then set up 3 different rules - one rule for for each channel.
The JQL for each rule would be how you specify when you want to alert each channel, you can create the query using something like assignee in (person1, person2, person3)...

It is possible to create a single channel to do that, but it's significantly more work - and will probably require you to leverage Slack mentions (alerts within slack).

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Georges DURAND  -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Regarding your questions...

1). You cannot access a group, in the way I believe you mean, within automation rules.  Groups in Jira are for permission management, and not distribution lists.  As an alternative, you could hard-code the list of people, or create custom field, user lists (e.g. FE Dev) to iterate over in the rule.

2). You appear to be asking now to notify everyone *except* the assigned person for a task.  If that is correct, you could use the above custom field I noted, removing the assigned person from the list (or skipping them), when sending the notifications.

3). Several people have suggested improvements in the mentions to Slack via automation (please see this suggestion: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-74092 ). Until this is improved in the product, you would need to use the slack ids and to notify them one-by-one in the automation rule.

Best regards,

Bill

[Georges DURAND]

Hello Bill,

You got everything right :)


1) I'm confused about this hardcoded list of user i can create.
Even with the Admin right, i can't find in my Jira Project where & how to create it.
i would like to create 3 lists of user who would be my team coleagues.

2) "you could use the above custom field I noted, removing the assigned person from the list (or skipping them), when sending the notifications."
==> I don't see on JIRA Automation a way to code to  do the removal. I'm a developer and i would love to be able to use javascript but it doesn't seem possible.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Georges DURAND 

For the hardcoded/pre-defined list, look at @Daniel Eads idea of using a custom field to hold the recipient list(s).

Now comes the hard part: there is no built-in automation action to remove an item from a list...yet.  However this is still possible; I recently did this to remove one component from a list.  The approach is:

• Convert the list of users into a delimited string, using the list join() function
• Use the string remove() function to delete the Assignee from the string
• Use the split() function to return the delimited string back into a list
• And then use the list as your recipients for notifications