Jira has many flaws that have been picked on by countless competitors like monday.com. Yet there’s a reason why Atlassian dominates the project management market with a whopping 86.63% in bug-and-issue-tracking market: the flexibility and customizability of their solutions.
Jira Automation 101
Jira Automation is a no-code feature that allows Jira users to create if this – then that conditions based on a wide selection of events and triggers like, for example, an issue being moved from “todo” to “in progress” or all subtasks of a parent issue being moved to “done”.
Some of the most common uses of automation for Jira are:
Making changes based on issue workflow transitions
Automatically assigning tasks to specific team members based on the content of an issue
Sending periodic status updates
Automatically creating issues for recurring tasks
Project VS Global automation rules
It is important to note that while the automation functionality comes with all Jira plans, the ability to add global or multi-project automation features is reserved for Premium and Enterprise plan users.
Project-specific automation means that if you have a need to set up the same rules across multiple projects – you’ll need to set them up individually whereas you can set them up once and apply them across multiple projects with global permissions.
Users and permissions
Not every Jira user can create or edit automation rules. You will need to be a Jira admin or a Project Admin in order to access this functionality.
You can access automation by clicking on the settings button??>System>Global automation.
Automation rules
Automations in Jira are called rules. You can create automation rules using 4 components:
Trigger: When a user performs a trigger action the automation rule will run
Condition: This element ensures that the automation is triggered if all of the conditions are met
New branch: This element creates a branch that allows to set up separate conditions for certain elements like subtasks of a parent issue
New action: This element defines what the system will do when the user triggers a rule and all of the conditions are met
Don’t worry if this seems too complicated or overly complex – all Jira best practices look hard at first. Luckily, creating rules is only intimidating on paper and gets much easier with practice. Speaking of the devil – let’s do just that and create a custom automation rule.
Let’s say we want to send out an email to pending approvers when someone leaves a comment with an attachment in the issue.
Let’s start by adding a trigger.
Start by creating a new rule and you will be prompted to add the trigger. Type in the thing you’d like to add as a trigger into the search bar. In our case, we want the rule to start when someone comments on an issue.
Then you’ll choose a comment type from the dropdown menu options. You can use one or several options here.
Next, you’ll be prompted to add a component. We can add an action to send an email to certain users at this stage. We won’t though, because that’s not what we want as we are particularly interested in letting people know about new attachments. So let’s add a condition.
You can add an issue of having attachments as a condition. And, while adding a component, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to trigger an action based on the attachment existing or not existing.
Now that the conditions are set we can add our action. You can type in “send email” to find the one you’d want Jira to take.
Read the full Jira Automation Guide on TitanApps, written by Oleksandr Siryi.
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