Automation for Roadmap - How to link parents dates based on children dates

[climpens]

Hey ! 

I want to create some automation for my roadmap in Jira. And there is one I can't make : to updates the dates of my parent work items based on the children work items dates.  

I need an automation that when I update a children work items, it updates the parent and that it takes the earlier date of all its children for the  start and the latest for thet end.

For exemple :

Parent work items : target start 01/10 - target end 30/11

- Children work items 1 : target start 01/10 - target end 10/10

- Children work items 2 : target start 15/10 - target end 30/11

I'm using the custom fields of roadmap Target start/Target end. And I can't select them in the action of the rule. These custom fields are blocked.

Any ideas how to create this type of rule with custom fields ?

Many thanks for the response.

Cindy

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @climpens 

The rule would need to set those roadmap date fields using JSON.  There is a related knowledge base article which shows the technique, although you will need to get the minimum and maximum values using the Lookup Work Items action with JQL over all of the child items to ensure accuracy.

Also please note well: the scenario you describe usually cannot be solved with one automation rule. 

There are multiple possible scenarios to handle that impact the parent / children, and you will need to decide both how accurately you want the values and the frequency of update.  Some of those scenarios are:

• when a child work item is added to the parent, update the parent
• when a child is removed from a parent, update the previous parent
• when a child changes to a new parent, update both parents
• when a child work item is created with a parent, update the parent
• when a child work item is deleted, update the previous parent
• when the dates change in a child work item, update the parent
• when a child work item changes type such that it no longer has a parent, update the previous parent
• when someone manually changes the parent dates, recalculate them
• when automation rules exceed usage limits, they will stop running and no further updates will occur
• when there an Atlassian incident / outage, some automation rules will not run even after the problem is solved, and thus having a scheduled trigger rule to update all the possible parents is a good idea
• etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Hardik Babbar]

Hi @climpens ! Check out this community post, it might help : https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-questions/Can-t-find-field-in-automation-like-target-start-date-and-target/qaq-p/3002300