Getting notifications about DONE child issues

[Sean Somerville]

I have a task with 6 different child issues underneath. Person A is responsible for a "build" and Person B else is responsible for a "review". How do I get the child issue 1 to relate to the child issue 2, so that Person B gets the notification that Person A finished their child issue/sub task and they can get started on their own issue?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Sean Somerville 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

One solution would be to use Issue Linking to establish a relationship between the two issues, like depends on/is depended on by. You could then use an Automation Rule triggered by an issue transition to Done. In the rule you could then check if the transitioned issue has any linked issues that are linked as is depended on by. You could then use the Send Email action in the rule to send an email to the Assignee of the dependent issue.

[Trudy Claspill]

@Sean Somerville 

How do you know that issue 1 has a dependent task? Are they linked in some manner?

An automation rule is triggered for every action that matches the trigger, for all issues in all Projects that are specified as in the Project Scope of the rule on its Rule Details page.

You then refine the issues to take action against by adding Conditions after the trigger; i.e. the rule should continue executing only if the trigger issue is a Task.

If you need to take action against another related issue or get information from another related issue, you have to tell the rule how to find that issue.

If you want the rule to work for any combination of task pairs where one issue is dependent on another, there has to be some generic, standard way for the rule to figure out that a) the trigger issue has a dependent task, and b) how to find that dependent task. Issue linking is one way to do that, and then the rule could be designed like the example I showed.

Without some generic and standard way to identify that a given task has a dependent task, there is not an effective way to automate the notification.

[Sean Somerville]

Here I have them linked. I have 3 similar ones that look like this. two issues linked where one is caused by another. How do I set up a rule that when issue 1 is done, the person responsible for issue 2 is notified. In a clean, easy way. 

Spitballing here: I want an email every time an issue switches from done, the person who is the assignee, will get the email that it is done. Without having to manually type that person's email into the rules. I want it to always send to the assignee of the linked task. Is that possible? 

[Trudy Claspill]

Yes, it is possible using the example I provided.

When issue NLCS-52 is transitioned to Done, for any issue linked to it with 'causes', an email will be sent to the Assignee of that linked issue.

Change the For Related Issues / Linked Issues to use the 'causes' link type.

Side note: if you are not very familiar with constructing automation rules there is free, on-demand training on that topic available at Atlassian University 

[Sean Somerville]

@Trudy Claspill you are a genius! Thank you! Can you help with the last part of this?

I got an email when the linked issue was changed to DONE... success! 

Can you help me understand {{issue.key}} and so on? How do I write the text so the person receiving the email knows which task/child issue was completed?

[Trudy Claspill]

You are talking about Smart Values.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/smart-values-in-jira-automation/

{{issue}} allows you to reference the issue that is currently "in focus" in your rule. Within the branch the linked issue is in focus.

If you want to refer to the issue that triggered the rule you can use the special smart value {{triggerIssue}}. That will always reference the issue that triggered the rule regardless of where you use it in the rule.

Use dot notation to get the data from fields in that referenced issue; i.e.

- the issue key: {{triggerIssue.key}}

- the issue Summary {{triggerIssue.Summary}}

Generally you would use a dot followed by the name of the field. The field name needs to exactly match the field name as you see it on the screen in the issue including blank spaces and capitalization.

In the documentation section I referenced above there is a page specifically about how to reference fields in issues.

[Sean Somerville]

I looked it this. I got so close, but yet so far.

Person A is in charge of issue 1, and Person B is responsible for issue 2.

Issue 2 is dependent on issue 1 being completed.

Person C is the reporter, but they just assign the task, they don't need to know when issue 1 turns to DONE and issue 2 can be worked on.

As Person A, I could put Person B's email in there to let them know when it's completed. But is that the best way to do it? Would this be a rule on everything? Do I need to set up this transition for each child task I do? What are your thoughts?