Why to automate Jira and what are the automations anyway?

As a general principle, automated solutions should replace any manual task that can be automated. That is also true for Jira. Automations increases job satisfaction and productivity. Your team will have more time to focus on other important tasks.

This blog post provides beginner-friendly information about automations. We'd like to introduce this feature to those who are new to Jira. Where to start and what to focus on?
At the end of this article, our consultant colleague collected the most common mistakes we can make!

What are the basic automations that you should or even have to use if you would like to increase your project’s productivity? Let’s find the answer together.

Before you start…Explore the three main components of automation rules.

Trigger

WHEN - What should be the launch event for this rule?
Is it going to be creating or updating an Issue, or an external system call? These all could be triggers of a Jira automation rule. This variety in the type of triggers is one of the key reasons that Jira automation is so powerful.

Conditions

IF - Under what circumstances should the rule execute?
To restrict the events that are triggered, you can optionally include conditions. Once the trigger initiates the automation rule conditions are checked and must pass before the actions are carried out.
For example, the automation rule only moves forward when the issue type is a task.

Actions

THEN - What should the rule do if conditions are met?

We could say that this does the work of the automation rule so this is the final component. What does it mean? When a trigger occurs and meets conditions you can for example create or update new conditions or send a slack message.

We have some tips before you start to create your first automation rule:

1. Build rules step-by-step → This is true for all automation rules, especially for complex ones. You need a solid understanding of the building blocks.
2. Create a playground to test rules
   If this is something that you are new to, we recommend that you do not use these instructions in a real world scenario. It's best to do some practice and testing first.
3. Don't assign issues when testing rules
   It is easy to overwhelm the assignees with too many automated notifications.
4. Use narrow conditions:
   Conditions enable you to limit actions to your specific use cases, making automation more straightforward.

Let’s see some useful and easy examples of the simple automation rules.

Example automation rule: I want to automatically assign issues transitioned to “Selected for Development” if they have high priority and are unassigned.

Normally issues are not automatically assigned to team members. However, this rule assigns unassigned issues with high priority automatically, ensuring that there is always an assignee for high priority issues.
It is also true that this auto-assigning capability can also be implemented using the workflow editor. So why choose creating an automation for this?
If you are a Jira project administrator you can make your life easier, as you can create this rule for your project without involving Jira administrators. You can save time and you will not overload the Jira admins.

Example 2:

You can inform your team by sending messages outside of Jira. If you like to start the day sending a notification message to your team with all the issues in progress, but haven’t been commented on in a week, you can do it. Create an automation which lists the affected issues and sends a slack message to your team with it. With this you can be sure that all of your teammates will be informed.

We have collected some useful tips from our Atlassian advisors! Let’s see the most common mistakes you can make when creating automation

1. Be careful and try to think through all the possible cases. For example if you have to do this or that based on conditions, what happens if a new option is introduced?
2. Test them as widely as possible. Think about other users with different permissions.
   For example:
   If you are in administrator rule, your automation runs normally. But someone who is in another role with different rights my find an error during the use
3. Always follow the audit log. If there is a problem, the system indicates it, but it cannot remedy the error by itself. So it is worth following whether the rules are executed correctly.

+1

• Please note that the automation reads the data on the ticket when the rule is started, but if you change something, it will not continue to work with the modified value, but with the original one.
  To follow this a very useful action called “Re-fetch issue data” should be used. With this you request the ticket data again on the go, and thus you can already work with the modified value

We hope this has helped you get started with automation. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with our Atlassian consultants if you require any further guidance or if you need a more complex solution.