Jira Automation with Weighted Scores and Ratings

[Will Harrison]

I am currently using the premium feature for Connections in JPD. My hierarchy is Initiatives -> Epics. On the Initiative I have a weighted formula (lowest score will get 0, the idea with the highest one will get 100, and all other ideas will get values in between) based on three different fields with type "Rating". I want to have the same calculated score on all of the connected epics and have it automatically updated.

What I have tried:

1) Copying the weighted score into a number field -> not supported?
2) Copying the rating fields -> not supported?
3) Creating logic based off of the calculated score to populate a number field (if weighted 100, then new field = 100) -> not supported?

Any advice or guidance would be awesome!

[Tanguy Crusson · Accepted solution]

Hi, I thought I had answered this a couple of days back but I probably forgot to save 😅

So, 2 things:

1. You can't copy formula values via an automation rule: the formulas are not saved in the backend, they're only calculated in the frontend (we do plan to change this later)
2. However you can copy values from rating fields between ideas using automation rules. We did change something about a year ago that makes it a bit harder to do though - so you'll have to watch this Loom to see how to do it

If you copy the ratings over from the "parent" to the "child" ideas, then the formula will work and give you the same number for both

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Will Harrison -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First thing, you appear to be using the Premium license level and I do not have that one.  Thus I may not see all of the features you have with JPD.  With that out of the way...

I saw your earlier question on this topic, and @Tanguy Crusson can confirm if there are ways to do this inside of JPD features: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Product-Discovery-questions/How-can-I-copy-a-weighted-formula-result-to-a-linked-issue/qaq-p/3013812

Assuming this cannot be done in JPD, automation rules could help.

I believe JPD's custom formulas and weighted fields are implemented with code for presentation in the UX, and so they are probably not stored with the Idea's data in a way customers can access directly.  To use that information elsewhere it must be recalculated, such as with automation rules.  I recall several community posts with similar JPD needs.

This would require creating math expressions using the same inputs as your weighted fields, perhaps with Lookup Tables to substitute for the JPD field weights, and then storing the result in a number custom field accessible to your other issues.

This will require multiple rules to handle different possible paths leading to the calculation:

• when a new Idea is created, calculate the value
• when one, or more, of the input fields changes in the Idea, calculate the value
• when an idea is deleted (or changes to remove it from the set)...
• the tricky part is weighting: if the values for multiple Ideas need to be recalculated based on changes to one Idea's inputs, rules may need to loop over multiple Ideas.

I have not tried to re-implement the dynamic weighting as an automation rule, and recommend starting with a more simple calculation initially before doing so.  This probably could be done by calculating the values, and then using math expressions and variables to manually perform the normalization process: find the min, find the max, determine the spread, apply to the values to result in a 0 to 100 range.

Kind regards,
Bill