Automation to trigger an email when the status of a task has not changed.

[george_hatzopoulos]

Hello!

Loving the new automation capabilities in JIRA software. After creating some simple rules I was looking for a way to generate an email to a user when the status of an issue has not been updated in over X amount of days.

I am working with a small team and it would be nice to remind a member that this issue has not been updated if a few days have gone by.

Am i missing something obvious? 

Thank you in advance :) 

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

what immediately comes to mind would be the following approach...

Create a scheduled trigger rule that runs daily and use a JQL condition, e.g. statusCategory != done and updateddate <= startOfDay(-3).

would that work or some variant thereof?

[Simmo]

Hi @george_hatzopoulos , 

@Jack Brickey is pretty much on the money for how to tackle this!

Cheers,

Simeon.

[george_hatzopoulos]

@Jack Brickey  @Simmo 

Wow! I was not expecting such a fast response!

Thank you for the recommendation.

Here are some bumps on the way to creating this rule.

1. When I simply set the Scheduled Rule Trigger to run daily (actually made it 8 hours instead) I was not able to activate the rule. I cannot remember the notice but I was required to further fill in on that first step a JQL query. I simply added "statusCategory = qa". So this means that this trigger will run every 8 hours and check items that have that status only?
2. The JQL query and the IF statements needed some wrestling. I kept on getting an error that the statusCategory QA does not exist so then I went into the board setting thinking that this is maybe the label to the status and not the status itself. Both were set to QA so I changed statusCategory to status and it worked good.

Waiting to see what happens.

My goal is to have an email sent to myself and the member responsible for the QA process after 2 days have passed and there has not been a status change. 

Here is what I added:

What do you think?

Again, thank you for the lightning-fast reply 

🙇 

[Jack Brickey]

glad to help George.

So first off there are only three valid status categories in Jira: To Do, In Progress, and Done. Unless something has slipped under my radar you cannot define new status categories.

Second, the reason you are being asked to fill in a JQL is because the tick-box "run a JQL search ..." is checked. If our intent is to operate on a specific set of issues in this rule then you use a JQL to bound the issues. You don't have to check this if not wanted.

Third, there is no need to wait for the scheduled time, you can manually run a scheduled rule to test it out. You should see the run button once you save any changes.

Finally, for scheduled events you can use a CRON to specify the precise time you wish to run the rule (hours, minutes, DOW, etc. Here is one source on CRON that might be useful but there are lots out there. construct-cron-expressions-for-a-filter-subscription . While the one I provided speaks to filter subscriptions the nomenclature applies here. Please remember that time will be in UTC so you will need to translate your desired time in your TZ to UTC so it runs when expected.

[george_hatzopoulos]

@Jack Brickey 

Thank you so much again for a thorough write up!

I managed to get it all set up.