Automation: Parent-child issues Transition

[Amy Chang]

Hi, 

Does anyone know how to do the below scenarios:

1. When the 1st Task transits from Priority to WIP, it automatically transits its parent to In Progress.

2. When the last child issue moves to Done, close the whole Epic.

In our project, we have 3 hierarchies - Initiative (1st ), Epic (2nd), and Task (3rd); their relationship can be referred to in the attachment below.

The problem I encountered is:

When one of the Epic is closed by the automation (Scenario 2), the Initiative will be affected by this automation and transit itself to Done even if it has the Epic (child) in In Progress status.

How can I avoid this problem, and what adjustments can I make to my automation?

Thanks!

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Amy,

Add a Condition in the first rule above right after the trigger and before the Branch to check if the Issue Type = Epic 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Amy Chang 

Agreeing with John's suggestion, and...some questions to clarify the use case:

Do you want the Initiatives to also update for those scenarios, based on changes to their child Epics?

For either of your rules, have you enabled the "Allow Rule Trigger" setting in the rule details at the top?  Enabling this option allow the action of a rule to trigger the same, or other rules.  That may not be desired if you do not want the Initiatives to automatically update.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Amy Chang]

Hi @John Funk  and @Bill Sheboy

Thank you for your suggestions.

Yes, it would be good if the automation could update the Initiative.

I made the automation for the Initiative (the same rule as the above attachment) but set it as the global rule. The reason is that in our Jira, each Project = each department, so we need a top-level type (Initiative) to include all the related tasks. The Initiative contains Epics from different projects, so I encountered difficulties with the automation. I'm not sure whether the automation didn't work perfectly because of this.

Moreover, I didn't select the "Allow Rule Trigger".

[John Funk]

So with those changes, is it working now? 

[Amy Chang]

Hi @John Funk 

Yes, it works well.

I made two rules: one is a multiple-project rule, another is a single-project rule. I defined the condition: who is the parent, and who is the child?

I also selected the "Allow Rule Trigger" in the second rule, so if I delete or add the fix version in the Initiative, it can automatically update all the issues (epic-level and task-level)

 @John Funk @Bill Sheboy appreciate your help.

[John Funk]

Awesome! Glad you got that working!