How do you notify customers when fixes are released (or deployed)?

[Dwight Holman]

Background

We have been using Jira Software (JSW) to manage customer support requests for many years (before JSD or JSM was available) with a two parallel Jira Projects:

• Product Development (Scrum)
• Customer Support (Kanban)

When a software change is required to resolve/address a customer request, a Dev issue is created and linked to the support request. Where implementing a software fix/change immediately for the customer is not required, not practical or not possible; this allows us to close-out customer support requests independently from the software development & release cycle.

The team have preferred to keep support requests open in a "pending release" status until the linked Dev issue is closed.

This allows us to manually notify a customer directly when a change or fix is released.

Notify Customer of Software Release/Deploy with JSW+JSM?

We want to use JSM to upgrade (streamline & automate) the support experience for our customers, but will continue to use JSW for our Dev backlog and release planning. We would replace our current Customer Support (Software) project with a JSM Project.

However it isn't clear (to me) how to notify customers of fixes/updates that we release which relate to their previous JSM requests. Some assumptions:

• JSM request is closed before JSW (Dev).
• JSW Dev issues relating to support requests will be linked to the JSM Support issues
• This seems a common scenario and other teams & admins are doing this too.

Has your software team (using JSW and JSM) automated release notifications to customers? ... or do you still do this manually?

Can you use Automation to implement email notifications based on a "Software Version" being marked as Released?

Perhaps you've built a solution using ScriptRunner or some other 3rd party app?

[Kai Becker · Accepted solution]

Hi @Dwight Holman

actually this is a common use case in our customer environments.

We usually use a setup like this:

• JSW dev ticket is created from first JSM request
• further JSM requests are linked to the dev ticket
• JSM request will stay in "pending" status
• when the dev ticket is resolved and feature got deployed (could be done via CI/CD pipeline), the dev ticket gets transitioned to a final status
• once this transition is triggered, an automation rule will handle the following
  • auto transition JSM request, so that 1st level support can contact the customer
  • (optional) auto comment on JSM request
  • (optional) include additional information in comment, e.g. release version, ...

[Dwight Holman]

Thanks for the answer.

In a DevOps environment this sounds workable, but some of our release cycles are much longer. For that scenario the Dev tickets are closed long before the software release happens.

I was hoping there might be a way to link this changes to the project version is released. This would suit our workflow.

Depending on the time-scale to resolve issues (e.g. improvement requests), do you find this means JSM requests are open for long?

Do you wait for the customer to confirm the JSM update resolves the problem, or do you just close the request?

[Mohamed Darmoul]

Hello ,

We Kai , we are using the same behavior , bit we are facing issues when a JSM project is linked to multiple Dev tickets . How can let JSM project status trigger when all the linked Dev tickets goes to Done status and not only one of the dev tickets . 

Best ,

Mohamed

[Dwight Holman]

Hi Mohamed,

Good question.

I have not implemented this in JSM yet - but I think you might be able to implement this using automation rules or using ScriptRunner.

We would also want to cover scenarios like this.

Best regards,
Dwight