Store Active Sprint in New Field? Using Jira Automation, Script Runner, or Both?

[Benjamin Dains]

ABOUT

If you look at the way Jira stores sprint information you will soon see it's quite complicated. Jira likes to save all completed sprints as an array along with the current sprint information which makes it really hard to pull out that one specific value. I am close to making this happen with Jira Automation, however, it falls short in the scenario below. So I included Adaptavist as well to see if this is possible or how to go about it with Script-Runner (we own both products).

It is also a shame because at the moment {{issue.sprint.last}} works most of the time, but since sprints are served up based on ID and not sequence, the sprints don't always line up in the correct order for which they've been ran.

GOAL

To save the active sprint name value (or any part of the list, please make it flexible) into a new field.

EXAMPLE

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"customfield_10105": [
  "com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint@4022a016[
    id=3980,
    rapidViewId=732,
    state=CLOSED,
    name=Sprint1 21.2.2 (4/29-5/19),
    startDate=2021-04-29T10:19:00.000-05:00,
    endDate=2021-05-19T10:19:00.000-05:00,
    completeDate=2021-05-17T08:52:21.889-05:00,
    activatedDate=2021-04-26T09:25:00.039-05:00,
    sequence=3981,
    goal=//,
    autoStartStop=false]",
  "com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint@61afd29b[
    id=3981,
    rapidViewId=732,
    state=ACTIVE,
    name=Sprint2 21.2.3 (5/20-6/9),
    startDate=2021-05-20T10:19:00.000-05:00,
    endDate=2021-06-09T10:19:00.000-05:00,
    completeDate=<null>,
    activatedDate=2021-05-17T09:07:27.256-05:00,
    sequence=4000,
    goal=//,
    autoStartStop=false]",
  "com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint@63b49544[
    id=4321,
    rapidViewId=732,
    state=CLOSED,
    name=Sprint3 21.2.1 (4/8-4/28),
    startDate=2021-04-08T15:01:00.000-05:00,
    endDate=2021-04-28T15:01:00.000-05:00,
    completeDate=2021-04-26T08:57:23.922-05:00,
    activatedDate=2021-04-08T13:33:06.126-05:00,
    sequence=3980,
    goal=//,
    autoStartStop=false]"
],

THOUGHTS

In the example above you can see the second sprint in this list is actually the most current, the state is active, the sequence number is higher, the start and end dates are closer, but the ID seems to be determining the order (which does make sense to me). This might be more of an edge case where this person changed the name of a sprint and then ran them out of the order they were created in.

Even though this is an edge case (maybe) it is what I am currently dealing with, and we should be able to get that value without this much hassle. I look forward to the responses.

JIRA AUTOMATION

I currently have an IF-ELSE automation that looks to see if the sprint is empty, and if it is then it sets our custom field to backlog, same if the sprint not in openSprints() or futureSprints(). The last else just updates the field with {{issue.sprint.last}} and this mostly works except for most issues that have, "completed sprints" associated to them.

SCRIPT-RUNNER

I thought about building a listener or some type of script but honestly I have no idea where or how to even start, I'm not familiar with groovy or importing methods to use so a lot of help would be appreciated here.

[Mykenna Cepek · Accepted solution]

@Benjamin Dains - I was working on something similar recently - on Jira Data Center.

See if this works for your use case:
  

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When I ran the rule, "Sample Sprint 4" was the active (open) sprint, and "Sample Sprint 2" was closed a while ago.

Note that this solution will work regardless of the order sprints are listed in the "Sprint" field.

Note that this solution may return multiple active/open sprints. I did not test that case.

Here's the magic in text form:

{{#issue.sprint}}{{#if(not(isClosed))}}{{name}}{{/}}{{/}}

For those using Jira Cloud, there's a related solution here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Get-active-sprint-name-in-smart-value-for-automation/qaq-p/1573065

[Benjamin Dains]

@Mykenna Cepek I just wanted to circle back and say thanks for this post. It works brilliantly. I actually don't need it for what I originally posted for, but turns out I do need it for something completely different!

So I just wanted to say thanks and I've accepted this as the correct answer. At the time of the writing I didn't really know how to iterate over an array using Jira Automation but now I do! :)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Benjamin Dains 

How much scope change do you have during sprints?  If the answer is "none" or "not much", have you considered using the Sprint Started trigger, and saving that sprint value in your custom field?

If you have a lot of scope change, a messier solution would be to use a web request to call the REST API to get all of the issues in the sprint.  That seems a bit heavy to solve this problem.

Best regards,

Bill

[Benjamin Dains]

Hi @Bill Sheboy !

Sorry for the long delay, we decided to turn off the automation since there really isn't a good way to get the value 100% of the time and was causing more confusion than value.

The scope does change often or else that does seem like a viable solution.

Thanks,
Ben

[wwalser]

I've managed to accomplish this through some trail an error. It's not as flexible as you've requested, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The basic gist is to use a combination of smart value list interpolation and create variable action to print out and then extract the active sprint name. Grabbing any other value from the active sprint object would also be possible. Your question indicates that you know how to lookup the values within said object so I'll skip that explination.

Here are screenshots of what you want:

Create a variable to store the sprint names and state information as a string.Log our regular expression to be sure it extracts what we expect.

Create another variable with the extracted active sprint name as a string.

Add a comment to an issue, just to be sure we can actually use this information in some meaningful way.

A look at the resulting audit log.

The comment was successfully added.

[Benjamin Dains]

@wwalser thanks a bunch for that help, I really appreciate it. I think the only problem that I have here is since we're on Jira Data Center, our Jira Automation doesn't give me the option to create a variable (which is extremely unfortunate). 

Is this example you've typed up related to Cloud?

[wwalser]

Ah yes, very sorry about that. This will not work on server. Unfortunately I'm not sure you'll be able to accomplish this on Automation for Jira server.

[Benjamin Dains]

No problem, thank you for your help! :)

[Benjamin Dains]

Bump to see if anyone has any ideas or help. :)

[Mykenna Cepek]

See my post this date (above).