Automation rule to transition issue to 'Ready to Work' when all blocker issues are marked as 'Done'

Question

Hi everyone,

We're trying to write an automation that transitions issues to 'Ready to Work' when all of their "blocker" issues are marked as 'Done'

Ex scenario:

TEST-1 blocks TEST-5

TEST-2 blocks TEST-5

TEST-3 blocks TEST-5

TEST-4 blocks TEST-5, TEST-6 and TEST-7

Once TEST-1, TEST-2, TEST-3 AND TEST-4 are all marked as 'Done', TEST-5 should be transitioned from 'To Do' to 'Ready to Work'.

Once TEST-4 is marked as 'Done', TEST-6 and TEST-7 should be transitioned from 'To Do' to 'Ready to Work'

Below is what we have built so far, but it is transitioning TEST-5 when only ONE of the 4 blocker issues is done. We need it to wait to transition until all 4 preceding tasks (TEST-1, TEST-2, TEST-3 AND TEST-4) are done.

Ideas on what we might have wrong? Or other ways to approach this?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Addison Alexander -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Please consider these questions which may help:

* Have you reviewed the audit log details and checked the links for the issues processed?
* Are all of the linked issues in one Jira project: "Addison Test"?
* Have any additional link types with names related to "block" been added to the site?

Your rule appears to be correct, although for such linking-related rules:

* links such as blocking have direction, and they must be correct for your scenario to work
* in my experience, the related issues condition for linking does not always work as expected

If after you review the log it seems the condition is not working as expected, a workaround would be to replace it with a Lookup Issues action with JQL to find the linked issues, and then check the returned count with the smart values condition, comparing {{lookupIssues.size|0}} to the number expected.

Kind regards,
Bill

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Addison Alexander

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Can you show us the Audit Log details for the execution of the rule?

What are the statuses of the other blocking issues for TEST-5 at the time the rule is run? Are those statuses color-coded green (vs. gray or blue)?

I notice that in your Condition you are using statusCategory rather than Status. Any status color-coded green is part of the "Done" Status Category. If all the blocking issues are in any green color-coded status, then they are in the Done Status Category and TEST-5 will be transition.

JQL based on statusCategory is not the same as JQL based on Status. JQL based on Status would require that the specific Status of the blocking issues all be set to "Done".