Clone Epic, Stories and Subtasks tree with Jira Automation

[#1]

Currently, there is no way to directly clone the stories and subtasks under an Epic in Jira. Indeed there is a feature request in place to add this functionality:

• Cloning an Epic - Include all Tasks/Child issues 

As a workaround, you can use Jira automation to solve this problem. For this, you will need to create the next two automation rules in your project:

1st Rule. Clone the Epic and the child issues

Clone the Epic

Save the epic ID

Clone each child linking the new issue to the new Epic, and append the original issue key to the newly created issue; this will help to identify the issue in the next rule to clone the subtasks.

2nd Rule. Clone subtasks.

Since the result of the 1st rule will trigger this new rule, you need to enable the checkbox shown below:

Create a variable to know from which original issue the new issue was cloned.

smart value: {{issue.summary.replaceAll("(.*key:)","")}}

Remove the old key from the summary string:

smart value: {{issue.summary.replaceAll("(key:.*$)","")}}

Look for subtasks from the original issue:

Clone each subtask, selecting the trigger issue as the parent:

If you need to clone the issue links or the attachments you can add the fields in the clone action as follows:

Please note some elements can't be cloned, like the history, comments, or logged time.

I hope that this article is useful for you and helps to improve your team's productivity using Jira and Jira Automation.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this article @Jorge H 

We have looked for a way to to this for some time (without an add on) and have done so using the REST API quite successfully with the option to clone to a differant project, set due date or assignee based on user requirements ...

Thanks for this too :)

[Jorge H]

Thanks a lot for your feedback @Yatish Madhav. I hope you and many of our customers can benefit from this solution.

BR,

Jorge Herrera

[Kelli Frattini-Adams]

@Jorge H I'm so glad you posted this! I have the first part working just fine - the create epic and all child issues. But I'm stumped on the subtask piece. I've copied everything you have but no subtasks are created. One caveat, I am using a custom subtype - "Sub-Testcase" but it is a subtask issue type.  Please help. I'm banging my head over here as I can't figure out what is wrong. When I check audit log too, it says successful but no subtest cases created.  Thanks so much!

[Jorge H]

Hi @Kelli Frattini-Adams,

I hope you are having a great day!

I see the regex to extract the original issue is not correct, I should be:

smart value: {{issue.summary.replaceAll("(.*key:)","")}}

And as per your snapshots, I see you are using the one to fix the summary (which is basically opposite to the other smart value).

Please, let us know if this has solved your problem.

BR,

Jorge