Jira is a great tool for different teams to organize work and track progress on reported tasks. However, as projects start growing and teams become larger, it’s very common to find endless backlogs on development boards and performing maintenance on them can become tedious and time consuming. Fortunately, Jira provides us with a robust automation suite that can be used to assist with this process.
In this article, we will describe how we used Jira automations in one of our projects to assist the team with backlog management, and how it was used to organize our Customer Support board as well.
In Jira, Automations can be accessed by navigating to a board, clicking on Project Settings on the left hand side menu, and going to Automations.
These consist of three main components:
In order to help with board maintenance, on our main Development board, we created three static sprints to allow us to organize tasks by relevance in time:
The objective of having these sprints is defining a structure on which cards would progressively be moved to lower priority backlogs as they’re not updated or prioritized in time.
So the first thing we needed to do is to make sure that any card that is Created on the board was sent to the Active Backlog so it could be prioritized for upcoming sprints, and this is easily resolved by the following automation:
With this, every time a card is created on the development board, it will be sent to the Active Backlog sprint for prioritization.
The next step is to define automation rules to move these cards to lower priority backlogs after some inactivity period. For these, we created two very similar rules:
Since closed cards on future sprints are not visible on the backlog UI, this last action allows significantly reducing the clutter of lost and forgotten cards.
Another use case on which automations are extremely helpful is to help manage Kanban-styled customer support boards. We have several of them in place to help with daily management tasks.
In this particular project, we defined "Hotfix Requests" as a special type of support card that often involves making small changes requested by Support analysts, be it fixing some typos on the UI, or changing the way something works, while not necessarily being related to any given User. We defined a system in which these need to be approved by at least 5 other Support Analysts before being worked on, to ensure that we don’t put out work for something that might not be a good idea and lead to a rollback later on. For this, new Hotfix Requests are created in a To be Approved state, and they have a multi-user field for Approved By that is updated by Support analysts when they review the card and agree with the change.
With these considerations in mind, there is this automation set in place to move these cards to the backlog after they are approved:
Another issue state we manage in this board is Waiting for Answer, which corresponds to cards for which the engineering team requires more information from the Customer Support team/client. It was very common for these issues to spend entire weeks in this state, without any kind of response, specially in cases where the issue was resolved automatically, so we built a very simple automation ensure that these cards are closed after 5 days without activity:
Additionally, in this context, we also have another very simple Rule that transitions the issues on Waiting for Answer back to the Backlog when a new comment is added, so that the engineering team can start working with the new information:
As shown in this article, Jira Automations are a great tool to assist with the management of different types of boards. They are often very easy to configure, and they can significantly change the time invested in mundane but necessary maintenance tasks. The rules that have been shown are relatively simple and serve as an introduction to the system, if you’re interested in learning more, don’t hesitate to review the official documentation at Atlassian Support:
