Jira Automation Ideas

[#1]

In case you need some inspiration, here are 65 ways you can use automation in Jira to make your life easier. You can accomplish all of these with built-in automation, workflow extensions, and scheduling apps!

Communicate Information

Send additional notifications

• Notify the project manager when an initiative is approved
• Notify customers when their feedback or bug is addressed
• Alert the legal and customer service teams when a new product launches
• Use an integration or a webhook to notify your team’s chat room of certain Jira events

Send weekly updates

• Send a report of all the issues you worked on this week

Show instructions

• Provide an on-screen message, after a workflow transition, to remind a user to perform a task they frequently forget to do

Automatically create issues

• When product features change, automatically create an issue for the legal team to revise the terms of service
• When there’s an outage, automatically notify customer service so they can be ready to address trouble reports
• If a customer support request requires development work, auto create the issue and assign it to the right team lead

Add watchers

• Automatically add previous assignees as watchers

Add comments

• Add a comment to any automatically closed issues, explaining why and how to reopen issues if needed
• Add a canned response based on a label

Communicate requirements

• Require users to link issues to their related initiative
• Automatically remind business owners to attach project requirements

Update Information

Automatically update issues based on certain criteria

• Assign issues based on custom field data like a certain skill needed or a specific office location
• Automatically assign issues to users in a list
• Add high priority bugs to the “Next unreleased version”
• Set a due date based on a creation date
• Update issues based on a JQL result
• Automatically log work on a workflow transition
• Update information in a child issue with information from the parent
• Automatically update the due date for all linked issues

Automatically transition issues

• If a code review is rejected in Crucible, automatically transition the Jira issue back to “To Do” status and notify the developer that there’s a problem
• If a code branch is created in Bitbucket, automatically transition the Jira issue from the “To Do” status to the “In Progress” status
• Automatically reopen a closed issue if a customer adds a comment
• Close an Epic when it’s Stories are closed
• Close all Sub-tasks when a Task is abandoned

Conditionally update issues

• Only update issues with a specific priority level
• Only update issues with a certain component selected

Log additional details

• When an approval is given, add the user’s name and the timestamp to custom fields, to easily see and report on that information

Automatically increment a number field each time an event occurs

• Count how many times an issue went into the “On Hold” status, was reopened, or was reassigned

Repeat Frequent Tasks

Create issues on a specific or recurring schedule

• Automatically create all scheduled maintenance tasks each quarter
• Automatically create all regression testing tasks
• Clone an issue each week for the next two years

Create issues based on components

• For each new hire, automatically create an issue for each application or resource the user needs
• For each new product, automatically create all the marketing tasks

Create reminders

• Create sub-tasks to remind yourself to log time at the end of each week
• Remind the customer to verify their request is resolved
• Remind the assignee to review an issue not updated in the last two days

Calculate information

• Automatically calculate the hardware purchase cost based on quantity
• Automatically calculate the level of effort based on estimates
• Automatically calculate the mileage fee based on travel miles
• Automatically calculate the training cost based on number of requests
• Sub all logged time for an initiative

Create related issues

• When a request requires development work, automatically create an issue for the dev team and link it to the customer request

Sync Information

Updated related issues

• When information changes in a parent task automatically update the child task
• Use regex to find issues mentioned in other fields and automatically link them together

Sync data between multiple Jira applications

• Sync information once an hour or once a day

Sync data with other tools

• When case details are added in Salesforce, automatically provide that information in the related Jira issue
• Automatically create requests from emails or chat conversations

Perform Maintenance

Delete old data

• Automatically delete old attachments to free up space or for compliance reasons

Schedule admin tasks

• Periodically look for changes in the list of users with application administrator access

Close old issues

• Schedule a JQL query to find all bugs older than 2 years and automatically close them

• Close all requests not updated by the customer in 7 days

Close duplicate issues

• When an incomplete issue is linked as a dupe, automatically transition the issue to “Done”

Send Alerts

Meet deadlines

• Find overdue tasks and alert the project manager
• Notify agents of approaching SLA deadlines
• Alert the hiring manager one week before a new hire arrives
• Send an alert when a project reaches 80% of it’s budget

Manage missing information

• Alert an employee if their expense reimbursement issue is missing receipt attachments
• Alert a project manager if an important task is missing approval

Surface high priority information

• Send alerts for high priority bugs, incidents, or impactful issues
• Detect and alert users to specific problems or key phrases

Catch undesired behavior

• Detect the word “password” to make sure a user hasn’t exposed their credentials
• Catch users skipping the QA test step before work is deployed to production

Have more ideas? Share them below!

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks, @Rachel Wright !  Here are a few more:

• Calculate process/workflow performance measures without additional addons
• Build dynamic queries not possible with out-of-the-box JQL
• Update a saved filter (e.g. used in dashboards), eliminating the need for manual edits when things change regularly
• Align version and sprint naming

Best regards,

Bill

[mararn1618 _secretbakery.io_]

Great piece of content! 👍

[Rachel Wright]

Fantastic @Bill Sheboy - thanks for contributing!  I love your idea to automatically update saved filters.  I'm so used to doing this for users but not having to transfer filter ownership to myself, make the JQL update, and transfer it back is a huge time saver.  I shall try this out instead.  Thanks again!

[John McKiernan]

Love this page of ideas @Rachel Wright !

I'll make sure I add a link to this from the Automation space so more people can find it. 

[Daniel Ebers]

Thanks for sharing, @Rachel Wright
There are many good thoughts in it which will make life easier!

@Bill Sheboy 
The third point of your list "Update a saved filter" sounds useful and interesting - am I right it would require interaction with REST API (just assuming because I was not able to find a corresponding action in automation)?
Is there already a post in Community where you probably explained the approach? I would love to read about specifics, how it works and how it is implemented (via search I was not able to identify any post about it so far, maybe I missed something).

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Daniel Ebers 

I used a webrequest action to the REST API to update the filter.  And I do not recall the specific post when I first tried the approach.  As I recall, I was helping someone make a dynamic filter that would first use Lookup Issues and text functions to create a list of keys, and then add that as ...IN (keylist) to a filter.  This allowed a nested query not possible with out-of-the-box JQL for a dashboard.

Here's a how-to on calling the REST API from a webrequest: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Automation-for-Jira-Send-web-request-using-Jira-REST-API/ba-p/1443828

And I used this REST API method: https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/REST/1000.824.0/#api/2/filter-editFilter

__Bill

[Martin Cleaver]

Provide an on-screen message, after a workflow transition, to remind a user to perform a task they frequently forget to do

Is this new functionality in A4J? As far as I know these two articles sum it up - you can't do it without JMWE.

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/How-can-I-display-a-popup-message-in-Automation/qaq-p/1416420
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Display-alert-popup-message-on-automation-rule/qaq-p/1143608

Thanks, Martin.

[Esther Strom]

@Martin Cleaver no, that's not a native automation function; not all of these ideas use Automation for Jira. The first paragraph of the article indicates that 

You can accomplish all of these with built-in automation, workflow extensions, and scheduling apps