Solved: add a task in the board using Jira automation

Solved: add a task in the board using Jira automation

When you start using Jira automation you enter a new world of endless possibilities. You start building workflows and process in order to solve Jira’s limits (yea, I hate Jira) and you think you can make literally everything.

My team needs to do a recurrent task every 2 weeks. We used to have a Slack reminder in our group that sent something like Remember to do this 🤓 . It worked for some times but then we realized that if we started to send a lot of messages in the group that message was forgotten and we forgot to do it. So it was not 100% reliable this process.

One day I started to play a bit more with Jira automation with the goal of solving this problem: I wanted to automatically add a new task to our board every 2 weeks so that we never forget to do it anymore. After the first test I realized that the new task was going to the backlog and I could not find a way to move it into the board. Googling a bit confirmed that I was not alone (forum request and actual feature request that was never implemented) and the workaround listed there were too complex and cumbersome.

At the end I came up with this simple solution:

• create a new task in the board and call it “Recurrent tasks container. Never close this task”.
• use Jira automation to add the new tasks into this container so that they will show up in the board.
• send a Slack message with the link to the task

The final workflow in Jira is composed of these steps:

1. the trigger step (When: Scheduled) that defines the CRON expression.
   • Important: you need to tick the Run a JQL search and execute actions for each issue in the query.. In the JQL you need to add the ID (id = XXX-1234) of the ticket that will act as a container. Also you need to unselect the Only include issues that have changed since the last time this rule executed option.
2. Create task step (Then: Create a new)
   • You need to select the project where it should be created and Issue type = Subtask and Parent task = Current issue.
3. A Branch rule / related issues step to use the info of the task just created selecting Most recently created issue.
4. Inside the branch you need to call the Re-fetch issue data otherwise this workflow does not know about the newly created task (is it weird, right?).
5. And finally the Send Slack message step.
   • The Webhook URL you will find it in your Slack app configuration.
   • The message can be something like: A new recurring task has been created: https://XXX.atlassian.net/browse/{{issue.key}} 🤓

Trigger step

Create task step

Branch rule step

Send slack message step