Automation to move issues to top (or bottom) of an active sprint?

[gordon_varney]

During a sprint, I find it helpful at standup to have the Done issues moved to the bottom of the sprint board and In Progress ones to the top (To Do are in the middle). I do this manually before each standup. Ugh.

I would like to create a bit of automation that would, say every day at a specific time, do that for me: move any In Progress to the top and any Done to the bottom.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @gordon_varney 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

The sprint board should have the issues organized into Columns where the different Statuses for issues are mapped to the Columns. You should not have To Do, In Progress, and Done issues in the same column.

Additionally, issues in an agile board are typically vertically ordered by a field called Rank, which Jira sets to a hash values that keeps track of the order of the issues. When you drag and drop issues to reorganize them within a sprint, Jira is setting that Rank field. However, it is keeping track of the Rank of each issue globally, as an issue can appear in more than one board. There is currently no automation support for changing the Rank field.

Can you show us your screen to help us better understand what you're looking at?

[gordon_varney]

We use swimlanes based on Stories and move sub-tasks across the To Do, In Progress, and Done columns. Works well for us. We have some automation now for Stories brought in to the Sprint but not yet started, to watch for the first sub-task to be moved to In Progress. WHen that happens, the parent issue's (Story) is automatically changed to In Progress. When all the sub-tasks are moved to Done for an issue, the issue's status is automatically changed to Done. Again, works well for us.

It is convenient for the team (and me) at standup to have all the In Progress work positioned up at the top of the Sprint board and all the DOne items moved to the bottom. Reduces scrolling a fair bit.

I do this manually about a half hour before standup.

The ask is how to write a bit of automation that, say at a specific time (let's say 8 AM EST) runs, looks at an issue's status and for those that are In Progress, move to the top of the Sprint board. Then for all that are Done, move them to the bottom of the Sprint board. That leaves the To Do ones just where we want them, in the middle (likely in the priority order the PO and team added them to the Sprint.

Ya?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @gordon_varney 

Thank you for that additional information.

In this post, @Bill Sheboy provided an answer that there is an open change request to support setting Rank in the Automation feature, and that there is a REST API that can be used to set Rank.

You might be able to create an automation rule that selects all the Stories in a particular status and then execute a Send Web Request to call that REST API to change the rank of the Story. I have not tried to work out the details.

Note that this doesn't simply change their order on the board. This will change the order of the listed issues in the Backlog screen also. And since Rank order is a global item, if the stories are incomplete and carried to the next sprint the change of ranking will affect their order in that next sprint also.

[gordon_varney]

Many thanks. THat sounds like it would work. It also sounds a bit past my abilities and I'm sure past what the JIRA admins have given me as permissions. Sigh.

I guess I'll need to keep doing it manually. Ugh.

[Trudy Claspill]

Another possibility would be to create a second board that pulls in only the non-subtask issues and uses Swimlanes set to Queries based on Status. That would show a view of just the stories, though. You would have to click through on the stories to see the individual subtasks.