Automatically marking an Epic as "Done" in the backlog when the Issue is done?

[David Lang]

Currently, when we are done with an Epic issue, we want to mark both the Issue itself and the instance in our backlog as "Done". I'm in charge of automating this, where marking the Issue page as "Done" automatically removes it from the backlog.

We have a few scripts, in Python, running off webhooks on another server. I was planning on setting up another webhook in the Epic's workflow transitions, but after looking around in the Jira-Python API documentation, I couldn't find anything that could manipulate the backlog. Is there another way to automate this process?

[Steven F Behnke · Accepted solution]

The Issue Workflow likely has a "Closed" status, something like that. Marking a Epic as "Done" on the backlog is done by setting the field Epic Status to "Done". 

You just need to make sure that you update the Epic Status customfield to DONE when moving to CLOSED and that you move it back to TO DO when you reopen the ticket.

[David Lang]

I hadn't realized that "Status" and "Epic Status" were two different fields. Thank you!

Edit: Apparently, this entire job can be done through adding a transition in the workflow to edit that custom field as well.

[Steven F Behnke]

No problem. 

This does leave a hole though. It's possible to open and close the epic status field with the workflow, but if someone marks and epic as Done via the board, the issue status won't update automatically. 

You could add a listen to handle this case. 

[David Lang]

A team member had just asked about this. Are the options for setting up a webhook on a backlog transition somewhere in the Settings? I can't seem to find them.

[Steven Behnke]

It's unclear to me if you're using JIRA Cloud or JIRA Server. Do you have the Scriptrunner plugin or are you using python-jira externally?

[David Lang]

I'm using python-jira externally (hosted on DigitalOcean). The server has Flask listening for requests.

[maichriedler]

I've written a small service that transitions Epics automatically if the status of linked stories is updated. It can be easily integrated into JIRA.

The source code is open source on GitHub here. I've also described in a blog post how it works here.