☀️ Jira July: Share your automation hacks!

[#1]

Hi everyone!

As part of the Jira July challenge, we want to hear about your favorite automation hacks. What are they? Do you have a favorite template? What do you use them for? How do they save time? Comment on the thread below to participate, and claim the Jira July badge.

But wait, there’s more!! Our very own automation product team will pick the best submissions to be included in the automation template library. Winners can bask the glory of naming the rule themselves   .

If you want a refresher on automation, check out the Jira guide on automation. Also, feel free to take inspiration from these posts Jira Automation Ideas and Jira Automation - all the resources you need in one page.

Excited to see your #jirajuly #automationtimesavers!

[Mykenna Cepek]

I'll offer several suggestions, based on what the teams I'm currently working with have found useful:

• Set unassigned Subtasks to same Assignee as parent - This rule is invoked manually on a Story-level issue. Commonly used after creating a bunch of new Subtasks on a Story.
• Fix the Epic Name in bulk - This rule is run manually on the Automation Admin screen. We use the "Create multiple issues from (Confluence) table" feature often. But an existing bug causes Epics created this way to all have the same Epic Name. This rule copies the Summary field into the Epic Name field (a common best-practice).
• Weekly reminder of Blockers in Slack - This rule runs once per week, identifying blocked issues in a project, and calls out assignees. It includes a link to the issue, and the number of days the issue has been blocked.

[Prashant Sangappa Shivashimpi]

Hi All,

Greetings. I am using JIRA from more than 6 Years and I am a HUGE Fan of this tool. It's amazing and best Project Management application in the market in this digital era.

I use "Create with shared configuration" for creating new JIRA projects in our instance. I create minimum of nearly 5 to 6 new JIRA projects and this automation feature really helped me to speed up and focus on working advanced level concepts in JIRA. I loved this feature and we can pre-define our project config and simply use it on the fly. It's a very cool feature.

I have worked with JIRA 5.X and now using JIRA 8.X. The product has evolved very significantly and many advanced features and automation tools have been added. 

My every Workday starts with JIRA and Confluence and ends with working on them.. I simply love these products day in and day out..!

BR,

Prashant.

[Markus]

Hi all,

First hack I've shared with the Atlassian community so here it goes!

Attached is a video of how I used automation for Jira to automatically place emoji's as a pre-fix to the issue's summary. Creates very visually pleasing boards :D

Here's a video of me explaining how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN7KPSdaF7cdN7KPSdaF7c

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi,

sometimes I need to do some action based on the hour of the day (for example, if issue is created after business hours, I would like to send email notification to reporter).

I've always used JQL condition like:

created >= startOfDay(7h) AND created <= startOfDay(19h)

 But there's another way - using advanced compare condition

{{issue.created.format("H")}}

with the added timezone

{{issue.created.convertToTimeZone(issue.reporter.timeZone).format("H")}}

exactly matches

(0|1|2|3|4|5|6|19|20|21|22|23)

I got this information here thanks to @Bill Sheboy  

[Patricia Francezi]

My favorite in "challenge accepted" category, is provide an estimate date for a custom field, based in SLA.

I worked in this customer with @Pedro Francezi 

You need to put your automation after some transition that may have the SLA calculation already done. Before the calculation is concluded the smart value would be Empty, so the copy value will be null....

We used the "In progress" transition. 

Condition to run is that the custom field is EMPTY - because if the SLA changes for some reason, this field should not be changed. 

Action - Edit field 

Select your Date and Time field 

use the smart value to fill this field with SLA information.

{{issue.Time to resolution.ongoingCycle.breachTime.jira}}

This is the SLA "Time to resolution". You may want to choose another one. 

[Colum McAndrew]

@Mykenna Cepek I'd be interested to know more about your "weekly reminder of blockers" automation. We want to flag tickets in a status that have been in that status for a particular period of time, and your solution sounds like the answer to our dreams :-)

Could you tell us how you achieve this? Many thanks.

[Paloma Fondon Araujo]

I love creating automation rules!

One of my favorite automation rules was when I was asked for an incremental number field that would show the number of times an Issue went from one state to another, for example, from Done to In progress, in order to count the number of reopenings the Issue had (simple but in my case very useful), so I created the following automation Rule:

I share it with you in case you find it useful too!
Greetings! 

[Markus]

🚨IT Service Desk - Extract On-Call Resource

Products Required

• Ops Genie
• Jira Service Management

Process

• Incident is raised on the JSM Portal
• IF 
  • Between 9-5 AEST do nothing
• ELSE
  • Query the applicable Ops Genie's roster specific to the product or service which is having the incident via RESTful API to extract the user who's on call 
  • Trigger a SMS alert to the on-call resource via Ops Genie
  • Assign the Jira incident to the respective on-call SD Agent
• END

[Alexander Pappert]

My favorite automation rule is to copy custom field values from a task to its subtasks.
I need this very often, because in my jira instance, we fill most of the cutom fields in the parent task, but I need some values in the subtasks to create my JQL queries

[Darryl Lee]

My favorite "hack" is using the import/export rules feature of Automation.

I have a whole article I need to clean-up about it, but in short:

• Rules are formatted as JSON, which is a tool for storing/presenting data in a human-readable format.
• There are lots of tools/libraries for parsing/manipulating JSON files.

So one hack is that if you have a rule on a Production Server, and also in your Sandbox/Dev Server, you can use common code-comparison tools to "diff" rules.

Unfortunately the JSON that Automation outputs is not formatted nicely, so I use the super-powerful jq tool in it's most rudimentary form:

jq . automation-rule-1128847-202009232238.json > prod-rules.json

 So, within that JSON you can see things like:

"name": "CI -> IN PROGRESS - Create Request (SDES): SAP",
"state": "ENABLED",
"description": "Create SAP Task",
"authorAccountId": "9e999aa9999ee999e9eee9e99",

But more importantly, you can use good old Unix diff to compare say, your Prod vs Sandbox rules:

diff prod-rules.json dev-rules.json

Anywho, because JSON is structured, you can actually do things like export, edit, and then import a single rule if you have rules that only differ by a particular Field value, Assignee, etc. It's even possible to use template tools of your choice to automatically generate rules in bulk. 

I plan to write a more extensive article on JSON hacking for Automation Rules, but hopefully this gives you some ideas to get started.

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

Hello there,

it's not a "hack" exactly, but I wrote a short article about the topic "How to manage projects with Jira smoothly and fully integrated with Microsoft 365".

☀️ Jira July: how to manage projects with Jira smo... - Atlassian Community

Happy Jira July, everyone!

[Lisa Grau]

It is not really a hack, but I used Jira automation to set a custom title and additional recipients in a Service Desk project, so the agents can choose the email title before adding a comment only for certain notifications. :)

Resulted in a pretty long "if-then" automation rules with different outcomes:

If the custom title and custom recipients fields are empty, the notification is send to the author with the issue as title,

if the custom title is not empty but the recipient field is, the notification is send to the author with the custom title and so on... :) Made our customers happy, so I am happy. I'd rather call it a workaround than a hack, but the stakeholders didn't want to spend money on an add-on, so we got that going°!

Happy Jira July!

[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings, community!

Not a hack, but a useful clean-up rule... Have you moved an epic to done status, only to find it hanging around in drop-down lists forever...patiently waiting for you to remember to go to the backlog and "mark as done"?  Well, no more:

Mark epic as "done, done, done"

• trigger: transitioned to done
• condition: issueType is epic
• edit issue: using advanced edit ("additional fields")

{
    "fields": {
        "customfield_10010": { "value": "Done" }
    }
}

You may confirm this matches your custom field ID for Epic Status using this how-to article.

Best regards,
Bill

[Sergei Gridnevskii]

I created an issue type Approval with a very simple workflow: Open, Approve, Decline. Then I added an automation rule that is triggered manually. Whenever system engineer or developer runs it on the issue page, it creates Approval issue, links it as blocker to original issue and copies Summary and Description to this new issue. After all the Approval is assigned to CIO. 

Now this is very easy - engineer sees that his issue is blocked by the Boss, Boss sees that it needs to be approved. It is very much convenient that links are displayed right there on the issue view page and anyone can see the status of approval.

[Kelly Lillis]

I created a BLOCKED status, and I added an automation that adds an impediment flag to anything that goes to BLOCKED. I like them to be in the To-Do column but to show as red/blocked for a visual scan that we need to do something before work can start. 

[Mykenna Cepek]

In response to a hack that I offered above, @Colum McAndrew wrote (and @Denise M Parmenter liked):

I'd be interested to know more about your "weekly reminder of blockers" automation. We want to flag tickets in a status that have been in that status for a particular period of time, and your solution sounds like the answer to our dreams :-)

Could you tell us how you achieve this? Many thanks.

I've heard that my #JiraHeroes submission of an article on this exact topic is schedule to run in mid-April. Colum and Denise, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you'd like an advanced copy!

[Mykenna Cepek]

@Colum McAndrew @Denise M Parmenter  My article about using Automation with Slack for periodic reminders is here:

#JiraHeroes April '22 Spotlight: Mykenna Cepek