In case you need some inspiration, here are 65 ways you can use automation in Jira to make your life easier. You can accomplish all of these with built-in automation, workflow extensions, and scheduling apps!
Communicate Information
Send additional notifications
- Notify the project manager when an initiative is approved
- Notify customers when their feedback or bug is addressed
- Alert the legal and customer service teams when a new product launches
- Use an integration or a webhook to notify your team’s chat room of certain Jira events
Send weekly updates
- Send a report of all the issues you worked on this week
Show instructions
- Provide an on-screen message, after a workflow transition, to remind a user to perform a task they frequently forget to do
Automatically create issues
- When product features change, automatically create an issue for the legal team to revise the terms of service
- When there’s an outage, automatically notify customer service so they can be ready to address trouble reports
- If a customer support request requires development work, auto create the issue and assign it to the right team lead
Add watchers
- Automatically add previous assignees as watchers
Add comments
- Add a comment to any automatically closed issues, explaining why and how to reopen issues if needed
- Add a canned response based on a label
Communicate requirements
- Require users to link issues to their related initiative
- Automatically remind business owners to attach project requirements
Update Information
Automatically update issues based on certain criteria
- Assign issues based on custom field data like a certain skill needed or a specific office location
- Automatically assign issues to users in a list
- Add high priority bugs to the “Next unreleased version”
- Set a due date based on a creation date
- Update issues based on a JQL result
- Automatically log work on a workflow transition
- Update information in a child issue with information from the parent
- Automatically update the due date for all linked issues
Automatically transition issues
- If a code review is rejected in Crucible, automatically transition the Jira issue back to “To Do” status and notify the developer that there’s a problem
- If a code branch is created in Bitbucket, automatically transition the Jira issue from the “To Do” status to the “In Progress” status
- Automatically reopen a closed issue if a customer adds a comment
- Close an Epic when it’s Stories are closed
- Close all Sub-tasks when a Task is abandoned
Conditionally update issues
- Only update issues with a specific priority level
- Only update issues with a certain component selected
Log additional details
- When an approval is given, add the user’s name and the timestamp to custom fields, to easily see and report on that information
Automatically increment a number field each time an event occurs
- Count how many times an issue went into the “On Hold” status, was reopened, or was reassigned
Repeat Frequent Tasks
Create issues on a specific or recurring schedule
- Automatically create all scheduled maintenance tasks each quarter
- Automatically create all regression testing tasks
- Clone an issue each week for the next two years
Create issues based on components
- For each new hire, automatically create an issue for each application or resource the user needs
- For each new product, automatically create all the marketing tasks
Create reminders
- Create sub-tasks to remind yourself to log time at the end of each week
- Remind the customer to verify their request is resolved
- Remind the assignee to review an issue not updated in the last two days
Calculate information
- Automatically calculate the hardware purchase cost based on quantity
- Automatically calculate the level of effort based on estimates
- Automatically calculate the mileage fee based on travel miles
- Automatically calculate the training cost based on number of requests
- Sub all logged time for an initiative
Create related issues
- When a request requires development work, automatically create an issue for the dev team and link it to the customer request
Sync Information
Updated related issues
- When information changes in a parent task automatically update the child task
- Use regex to find issues mentioned in other fields and automatically link them together
Sync data between multiple Jira applications
- Sync information once an hour or once a day
Sync data with other tools
- When case details are added in Salesforce, automatically provide that information in the related Jira issue
- Automatically create requests from emails or chat conversations
Perform Maintenance
Delete old data
- Automatically delete old attachments to free up space or for compliance reasons
Schedule admin tasks
- Periodically look for changes in the list of users with application administrator access
Close old issues
- Schedule a JQL query to find all bugs older than 2 years and automatically close them
- Close all requests not updated by the customer in 7 days
Close duplicate issues
- When an incomplete issue is linked as a dupe, automatically transition the issue to “Done”
Send Alerts
Meet deadlines
- Find overdue tasks and alert the project manager
- Notify agents of approaching SLA deadlines
- Alert the hiring manager one week before a new hire arrives
- Send an alert when a project reaches 80% of it’s budget
Manage missing information
- Alert an employee if their expense reimbursement issue is missing receipt attachments
- Alert a project manager if an important task is missing approval
Surface high priority information
- Send alerts for high priority bugs, incidents, or impactful issues
- Detect and alert users to specific problems or key phrases
Catch undesired behavior
- Detect the word “password” to make sure a user hasn’t exposed their credentials
- Catch users skipping the QA test step before work is deployed to production
Have more ideas? Share them in the comments section below!
