Jira Automation - How to identify what Epic a Story was linked to?

[Patrick Kramer]

I know there's a significant amount of conversation around the aggregation of story points onto Epics. I'm able to monitor the Story Point field to trigger a rule that runs in the context of that Story's Epic and Sums all the Story points onto an epic. No Problem.

What I'm trying to figure out is how to catch the event where a Story is removed from 1 Epic and added to another in order to make sure both the Previous Epic and the Current Epic has their aggregated Story Points recalculated. It seems to me that I can monitor for a Story being updated using the "Issue Updated" trigger (because I can't listen only on Epic Link Field change anymore), In that case I can identify the "New" Epic and reaggregate the Story points on it, however I'm unable to identify the "Previous" epic. Changelog doesn't seem to be my friend here. I'm also not loving the idea of listening for any "Issue Updated" event as that will trigger many more automation runs that I'm interested in.

Does anybody have any ideas? I'm stuck

[Manon Soubies-Camy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Patrick Kramer,

I agree with you about triggering automations from "Issue updated", it's not ideal as it can trigger a lot of automations. I'm afraid it's the only option to get what you want though, see the example rule below:

You can use the following smart values:

• Previous epic: {{changelog.Epic link.fromString}}
• New epic: {{changelog.Epic link.toString}}

Hope this helps!

- Manon

[Patrick Kramer]

Fantastic! This works! Thanks Manon. 

I also attempted to use changelog.parent.key under advisement of Parent being the new best practice, but that appears to not fit under what is available in Changelog. Looks like Epic Link will suffice for now. 

Thanks again.