My Love (albeit late) for Automation and Simplification

[#1]

As with most of the members of the Atlassian Community I’m a lover of all things Atlassian but I wanted to take a moment to extend that love to two addons I have been using more and more of late. If you use either please leave a comment as to how and maybe a tip or two you can share w/ others. If you don’t, I encourage you to give them a try if you have a need.

One thing before we get started, I am in no way affiliated with either of the addons I mention here. They simply represent some that I have found very useful. There are other addons that I know of that I’m sure are as good or maybe better. Choose the best addon for your needs and my advice is to trial several if you can before landing on the one that fits your needs.

Automation

Everyone loves automation as it removes the tedious repetition out of our daily lives and improves on consistent results. When I started using JSD Cloud a few years back I really appreciated the build in automation as I could get the results I desired to meet my process needs. However, after some time my appetite for automating things grew beyond what was available OOTB. So, like everyone else I turned to the Marketplace for options. I landed on Automation for Jira and it free sibling Automation Lite for Jira. The author – Code Barrel Pty Ltd. – has done a great job of providing some very powerful tools that take not only JSD automation to the next level but JSW as well. I have been very pleased with the capabilities and ease of use of this addon app. Automation construction is presented in easy to understand ‘When-If-Then’ logic steps but it also provide quite a library of variables that can be incorporated to really polish things up in the end. My collection of automation continues to grow. Today I primarily use this for JSW but I do have a couple of JSD scenarios I will be considering. Here are some examples:

• Creating a template Epic – In my world we have a project that has tasks that are associated with assessing new product opportunities. In these tasks we assess the opportunity, viability and effort of the project and if approved we kick of a project which translates to an Epic in another project. These Epics are quite repetitive in the steps we follow. I have use Automation for Jira as a means of creating the Epics along w/ the Tasks and Sub-tasks once the assessment task is marked “Approved”. As we do maybe 2-3 of these a week, each Epic having maybe 15-20 components, so it really save us time.
• Onboarding of New Hires – I have recently expanded our HR Staffing project to incorporate On-boarding of new hires. Our on-boarding involves actions from HR, the hiring manager and IT. I have used Automation for Jira to help with creating the various tasks in the various projects, assigning them to the right people and have been able to inherit details from the original staffing request to link them altogether. I have also, use custom fields and variables to include the new hires name and contact info so that it is right at the assignees fingertips. Moreover, if something goes sideways during the on-boarding process then assignees of linked tasks are notified.
• For JSD  we are looking to extend our usage to external customers. When we do this I intend to leverage the ability to set the Organization based upon reporters domain
• I also want to look at automating the creation of issues in JSW if the incoming JSD issue needs development.

Simplification with Checklists

Very often tasks breakdown into many sub-tasks and thankfully Atlassian has considered this w/ the Task/Sub-task relationship. However, I find this can be a bit heavy handed at times and would often just forego sub-tasks in favor of a bulleted list in the description. Well, after trialing Issue Checklist Pro I have landed on a solution that allows me and my team to quickly create tasks from checklist templates or checklists on the fly.

The driver that initially had me searching the Marketplace for a solution was associated w/ the aforementioned onboarding project. While, Automation for Jira was great for automatically creating many issue and getting them into the right hands, it would be a bit heavy handed create 20+ sub-tasks. Issue Checklist Pro to the rescue. This addon allows you to easily create checklist templates and associate them with issuetypes on a per project basis. While it didn’t have every feature I wanted it came quite close and I understand that some of the things I’m hoping for are on the shortlist for delivery soon. What I have found after introducing this is that many users have commended the addition and are actively using to meet their needs.

Once again be sure to explore similar automation and checklist addons as there are some great ones out there beyond what I have shared here.

Cheers, and see you all in the Community!

[Elifcan Cakmak]

Hello,

We have been looking for a solution to the second issue that you addressed and a colleague of mine encountered with Issue Checklist Free plugin, the free version of the plugin you mentioned, and we have been meaning to try it as well! I'm glad that I ran into your article and saw an actual useful implementation. We also have recurring issues that we create every month and we use cronjobs and special scripts for this purpose :) I will make sure to check out the automation plugins you shared, too.

Thanks for writing this article!

Cheers.

[Jack Hunter _HeroCoders_]

@Jack Brickey, @Elifcan Cakmak thank you for choosing Issue Checklist! 

We pay a lot of attention to details of implemented functionality which hopefully makes a difference. 

I believe you will like Issue Checklist even more with the new features that we plan to release in the coming weeks and months (checklist item statuses are first to come).

We are very grateful for any feedback so please share one if there is anything that you would like to change or add. 

Thank you,
Jack

[Sebastian Brudziński]

Multiple Checklists for Jira is another alternative to the existing checklist apps. It allows maintaining multiple checklists in a single Jira issue, eg. a checklist for the Definition of Done, a checklist for Acceptance Criteria, etc.