Create identical tasks across several projects via automation

[Ramsi Hawkins]

I help manage the a release process for a single application that is contributed to by about 20 teams, each of which has its own Jira project, and I'm looking for ways to use automation to define all of the tickets and then get copies sent out across all of the projects.

There are standard tasks that need to be completed by each project team each release (such as regression testing & signoff) and today each of the tasks gets created adhoc by each of the projects as issues in their various Jira projects, but it's time intensive and inconsistent.

We're looking to use automation to automatically create all of the known tasks in the appropriate projects as children of a central epic, but are struggling to find a maintainable solution. Currently it seems like each ticket has to be created as its own individual step, which is fine for initial setup, but seems like a nightmare to maintain since it'll be an automation with potentially hundreds of steps for each ticket that's created.

Is there any way to set up some sort of for-loop or something where we can define the teams to iterate over? The best option we've thought of so far is to define each of the tickets and then add a clone action for each project so at least changes don't need to be made in 20 places each time we find a typo or want to change acceptance criteria, but this still ends up with an automation rule with over 100 steps, which is just asking for trouble.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ramsi Hawkins 

For cloning scenarios like this, the details determine what is possible and how to proceed...

For example:

• When the issues to be created are identical for the different teams, one could use Create Variable for the team and use the Advanced Branch to iterate and create them
• When there are minor variations, the team information (and variations) could be stored using Create Lookup Table, and once again iterate with an Advanced Branch over the table entries for processing
• When there scenarios are more complex, such as specifics for each issue, options could be
  • Use a marketplace app specifically for complicated cloning scenarios
  • Use an automation rule which stores the various issue data as JSON in variables / tables, and call the REST API endpoint to bulk-create issues.  This would likely be very difficult to maintain.
  • Create template issues (or CSV files) and build your own application which calls the REST API endpoints to iterate and create the issues
  • etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Ramsi Hawkins]

Thanks so much, Bill. I'll dive into Lookup Tables more as this might allow us to define and iterate over a list of projects.

[Bill Sheboy]

Please see this Atlassian article on using the entries function with the Lookup Table:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Automation-articles/Update-Create-lookup-table-action-improvements/ba-p/2427798

[Luka Hummel - codefortynine]

Hi @Ramsi Hawkins

If you're open to using a marketplace app, our app Deep Clone for Jira can help streamline this process significantly. With the Bulk Clone feature, you can define a set of standardized issues in a template project and clone them across multiple projects in just a few clicks. This is ideal for release checklists or recurring tasks that need to be identical across different teams.

Deep Clone allows you to:

• Clone multiple issues (up to 100,000 in one job)
• Preserve issue hierarchies
• Edit fields during cloning, using static values or Jira expressions

[Varsha Joshi]

Hi @Ramsi Hawkins 

Could you help provide more details on central epic - is it worded the same/similar across all the projects? I am assuming you have more than one epic in each of these projects. One of the initial tasks to get the right JQL and then they can be iterated over to create the tasks.