Jira Automation: Building New Rules in 5 Easy Steps

Businesses use a number of Work Management Systems and Issue Trackers to keep track of their tasks. Jira was designed by Atlassian as a Bug Tracking and Agile Project Management software tool. Jira is a multilingual tool because it supports English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

On a complete walkthrough of this article, you will gain a decent understanding of Jira Automation. Also, you will be able to set up Jira Automation and gain in-depth knowledge of all the terminologies and processes involved in Jira Automation.

Table of Contents

• What is Jira?
  • Key Features of Jira
• What is Jira Automation?
• Basic Concepts of Jira Automation
  • Rules
  • Triggers
  • Actions 
  • Conditions
  • Branching 
  • Rule Status
  • Smart Values
  • Audit Log
• How to Create a Rule in Jira?
• Use Cases of Jira Automation
  • Scheduling Tasks
  • Assigning Issues
  • Integrating with External Tools
• Conclusion

What is Jira?

Jira was designed by Atlassian as a Bug Tracking and Agile Project Management software tool. Jira is a popular multilingual tool because it supports English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

It is often used as an Issue-Tracking tool for various forms of testing. It’s Project Management, Bug Tracking, Issue Tracking, and workflow tool that may also be used for incident management. It’s quite adaptable and can be customized to fit any workflow. Jira supports MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL as backend databases.

Key Features of Jira

• Accessible Data: Jira collects and organizes all of your company’s Historical Data. This website allows users to easily access and retrieve data whenever they need it. Users can do a number of Statistical Studies, including Trend Analysis, with this tool. It also makes preparing Constructive Reports on Operational Progress a lot easier.
• Engaging Workflow: Jira also provides you with a 360-degree view of your processes, which is really helpful. This ensures that everyone on the team understands the processes and that no procedures are overlooked. In fact, team members receive frequent updates on topics that interest them, and they can discuss, share ideas, and attach important documents.
• Agile Project Management: Scrum and Kanban techniques are offered on the platform, which largely focuses on Agile Project Management. It can also record regulatory evidence at different stages of the development process. Jira Software also offers a number of Estimation Methods, such as Hours, Storey Points, and others. You can always be sure you’re working with the most up-to-date data this way.
• Scalable: If you choose the Premium Package, you can rest be assured that JIRA Software will grow with your company. There is no limit to the number of files or attachments you could post, making collaboration easier for starters.

What is Jira Automation?

Jira Automation was acquired in October 2019, Since then Jira Automation delivers its Powerful Automation Engine to all Jira Cloud Clients. Here’s what you can expect from this impressive package:

• The native functionality allows you and your team to automate Time-Consuming, Repetitive Chores so you can focus on more important duties.
• Work can get a little sloppy. There are a lot of teams, a lot of tools, and a lot of processes. All of the Information is organized for you through Jira Automation, which reduces your Workload and Complexity.
• It not only works with all Jira Cloud products but also with Slack and Microsoft Teams.
• DevOps principles flow smoothly from Code to Production because of Jira Automation.
• This functionality enhances Jira Service Desk’s ITSM capabilities by automating activities that cross DevOps and IT operations, teams.

It’s also, and perhaps most crucially, simple to use. You’ll have more power while avoiding Complication. More than half of workers who have automated their work with Jira say it saves them more than six hours per month, and 87% believe it helps them scale the way their companies function, according to a poll of existing Jira Automation users.

Jira has always been a single source of truth for teams. Your work will just flow now that Jira Automation is working diligently in the background, helping your team’s productivity to reach new heights.

Basic Concepts of Jira Automation

Rules

You can use rules to automate operations in your system based on the criteria you specify. Triggers start the rule, conditions refine it, and actions carry it out on your website.

The building components of Jira Automation are triggers, conditions, and actions. Simply mix these components to construct rules that can do everything from automatically closing old issues to contacting certain teams when a release is out.

Triggers

A Trigger is the first step of any rule. They begin the process of putting your regulations into action. Triggers will listen for events in Jira, such as the creation of an issue or the changing of a field value. Triggers can be adjusted and configured to run on a schedule before being applied to a rule.

View the list of triggers that are currently accessible here.

Actions 

Your rule’s doers are actions. They give you the ability to automate operations and make modifications to your website. They give you the ability to do things like modify an issue, send a notification, and create sub-tasks.

View the list of activities that are accessible here.

Conditions

You can use conditions to limit the scope of your rule. They must be fulfilled in order for your rule to continue to function. For Example, you can create your rule to escalate an issue only if it has a high priority. If a condition fails, the rule will cease running and no actions will be taken as a result of the failure.

View the list of conditions that are currently accessible here.

Branching 

Jira issues rarely occur in isolation. They frequently include sub-tasks, are part of a greater epic, or are simply tied to other issues through specific relationships. This means that actions must often apply not only to the source issue that triggered the rule but also to any issues that are related to the source issue when employing automation.

To develop powerful rules that can work across complicated issue linkages, special conditions and actions are offered. For Example, Checking if all sub-tasks of a parent problem have been completed.

Rule Status

You may check the status of an automation rule to see if it’s currently active or not. A Rule that is now inactive will not execute until it is enabled. On the Details Tab for a rule, you can view its Current State.

• ENABLED This rule is currently in effect.
• DISABLED The regulation isn’t in use right now.
• DRAFT Unpublished adjustments have been made to the rule.

Find out how to enable and disable your rules here.

Smart Values

Smart Values provide you access to and control over a wide range of issue data on your website. They can provide your rules with a lot of Power and Intricacy.  For Example. the Smart Variable now.plusDays(5), refers to the current time and adds 5 days to it, whereas issue.summary prints the issue’s summary.

Find out more about Smart Values here.

Audit Log

You may inspect the Audit Log for each of your rules to see when the rule was triggered, the final outcome of the execution, and any actions that were taken.

You can look at the Audit Log for a single rule, the entire project, or the entire environment. Examining your Audit Logs is a good technique to debug your rules.

How to Create a Rule in Jira?

Consider the case below. When a New Bug is reported, your team must construct the required sub-tasks on the issue manually before it can be assigned to a user.

This procedure is simple to automate. You may make a simple rule that adds sub-tasks to any new Issues and assigns them to a certain user.

Steps to build New Rules in Jira

• Step 1: In the top-right corner of your Jira Automation Settings, select Create Rule.
• Step 2: Save the Issue generated trigger. Select the Issue fields condition from the New condition drop-down menu.
• Step 3: Set up the condition like this:
  • Change the field’s value to Issue Type.
  • Set the Equals condition to true.
  • Set the value that will be compared to Bug.
  • Select the Save option.
• Step 4: Select the Create sub-tasks action from the New action menu. Set up the action like this:
  • Inspect code, Troubleshoot, and Resolving are three sub-tasks to add.
  • Select the Save option.
• Step 5: Select Assign issue action from the New action drop-down menu. Select a user to assign the task to, then click Save. Select Turn it on after giving your rule a name.

Use Cases of Jira Automation

You can use Jira Automation to establish rules for a variety of scenarios. Here you’ll find a collection of popular Jira Automation use cases to get you started. Hundreds of more automation templates can be found in our automation template collection.

1) Scheduling Tasks

Automating job scheduling not only saves your team time but also ensures consistency and reliability in your workflow. If a customer hasn’t answered your support engineer’s query on an issue, you can set up a rule to send them a reminder and close the stale problem temporarily.

Steps to build Scheduling Tasks Rule 

• Step 1: The Scheduled Trigger should be used. Set the rule to run every day, with the status = “Waiting for customer” and the update time set to <-5d. If the status of an issue is “Waiting for Customer” and it hasn’t been updated in more than 5 days, this will trigger the Rule.
• Step 2: Add a comment to the problem Action, alerting the client that the issue has been closed because of inactivity.
• Step 3: Set and customize the Transition issue action to change the issue’s status from Open to Closed. Give your rule a name, then activate it.

It’s critical to keep connected concerns in sync when dealing with Sub-Tasks and their Parent Issues. For Example, Using branch rules, automation makes this simple. When you finish a Sub-Task, you can set up a rule to automatically move to the Parent Issue if there are no more unfinished Sub-Tasks.

Steps to build Sub-Tasks Rule 

• Step 1: The Issue transitioned trigger should be used. When an issue transitions from one status to another, this trigger allows your rule to run. When an issue is moved to the Done state, set the trigger to respond.
• Step 2: To verify if the issue type is a Sub-Task, add an Issue fields condition to your rule. The rule will stop running if the issue that prompted it is not a sub-task.
• Step 3: Select parent as the relevant issue category when branching the rule. This means that the rule’s following conditions and actions will be applied to the parent problem of the rule’s triggering issue.
• Step 4: To verify if Sub-Tasks match status = done, add a Related issues condition to your rule. This will ensure that all of the parent issue sub-tasks have been completed.
• Step 5: Finally, specify the Transition issue action so that the parent issue’s status is updated to Done. Give your rule a name, then activate it.

Sub-Tasks that inherit values from their parent, such as Fix Versions, are another popular use case. You can sync these values to ensure that both the parent and the sub-task have the most up-to-date data.

Steps to build Fix Versions Rule

• Step 1: Use the Field value to change the trigger to alter the value of a field. When the value of a chosen field changes, this trigger allows your rule to run. Set the trigger to keep an eye on the field Fix versions.
• Step 2: Select Sub-Task as the relevant Issue Category when branching the rule. This means that any Sub-Tasks of the issue that triggered the rule will be subjected to subsequent Conditions and Actions.
• Step 3: Set and configure the Edit issue action to copy the value from the Parent Issue to the Fix versions field.
• Step 4: Give your rule a name, then activate it.

2) Assigning Issues

Teams leave this to the engineers’ judgment, resulting in some unassigned issues sliding through the cracks. For Example, You can use automation to address this by automatically assigning issues to members of your team in a balanced manner.

Steps to build Assigning Issues Rule

• Step 1: Choose a rule’s trigger, as well as any conditions you wish to use to describe the issues you want to auto-assign.
• Step 2: Use the Assign action to assign an issue. This action enables you to quickly assign issues to a variety of situations.
• Step 3: Set the action to allocate the problem to a specific user from a list. This lets you choose a group of users from which the action will choose the assignee.
• Step 4: Set the mechanism for assigning a balanced task to the assignee. This implies that the problem will be allocated to the user who currently has the fewest open issues.
• Step 5: Search for and pick members of your team from the user list. To apply the action, select Save, then give your rule a name and pick Turn it on.

3) Integrating with External Tools

Jira Automation works in conjunction with your Source Code Management platform to automate your Development Operations.

For Example, When a pull request is merged you might want to move a related issue to Rolling Out if a feature flag is associated with it. You’d move the problem to Done if it wasn’t the case.

Steps to build Pull Request Rule

• Step 1: Use the merged Pull request trigger. When a Pull Request is merged in your Repository, this trigger allows your rule to run.
• Step 2: Add the if/else condition to the If/else block. This condition allows you to take different actions depending on whether or not your conditions match.
• Step 3: Add and configure the condition of the Related issues in the If block to see if there are any related issues with the link under feature flagged by.
• Step 4: Set and configure the Transition issue action, which changes the issue’s status to “Rolling out.”
• Step 5: Set and configure the Transition issue action in the Else block so that the issue’s status is changed to Done. Give your rule a name, then activate it.

When a specific engineer makes a contribution, you can set up a rule to notify your team by sending them a Slack message.

Steps to build Slack Messaging Rule

• Step 1: Use the trigger that Commit has established. When a Commit is produced in your Source Code Management Tool, this trigger allows your rule to run.
• Step 2: Add and configure the User condition to check the assignee name.
• Step 3: Set up the Send Slack message action to send a message to your team’s Slack channel informing them of the commit. Give your rule a name, then activate it.

Conclusion

This article teaches you about Jira Automation. It provides in-depth knowledge about the concepts behind every step to help you understand and implement them efficiently. In case you want to analyze data from Jira into your desired Database/destination, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! 

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