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Diego
Diego

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Updating tasks in JIRA

Here i'm going to share a part of our mix Agile workflow that we have in our company.

The thing is that we have like ~200 task assigned to each member of the team in an unresolved situation. This is an accumulation from 2 years of getting requests and new ideas from all sources. It's happen because we don't wanna loose anything and we think that the most of the times, if it's a request of a customer, it's because there is a necessity to cover, even if the client left we stay with the task open, capitalizing the moment.

So what happen now it's that our team increase the size and it's difficult to see what everyone does and it's difficult for the developer know what to do because they don't know what are the important tasks for our customers. So we set-up a kanban board and clean-up some tasks.

The workflow is very simple:

  • Selected for development
  • In progress
  • Under Review
  • Done

We manage like a manual sprint, with a week release but with daily post in our chat room.

The issue is that we have too many tasks in "Selected for Development" because of the old tasks, so we sended with a "dueDate" to a "Backlog" status. If the task is in Backlog the developer doesn't see it until it's in "Selected For Development", this helps them to get a clear vision of what they need to do.

For this issue I set-up a script that updates all the tasks with a "dueDate" of 30 days and update the tasks from "Backlog" to "Selected For Development". The number of days can change with every project, but is a general idea and we are iterating to see how this works.

Here it's the repository with the code:

Group of tasks that automate process

Getting Started

To start is necessary rename the file .env.sample to .env.

Set the correct credentials depending on the project that you are running.

Jira Update Status Tasks (Tasks/Jira/UpdateTasks/UpdateTasks.php)

This task allows update Jira issues to a specific transition(status). We used to change the status of the task per Due Date condition, avoiding missings issues in Jira.

Update the .env file

Set the JIRA variables in the .env file

Config File

There is a config file in Tasks/Jira/UpdateTasks/config.sample.cfg. First copy the file accordingly your environment, for example:

  • config.production.cfg
  • config.development.cfg

Then set the variables:

[issue_days]

The ammount of days to find issues from the current date.

[users]

The users that need to be analyzed. In a future we are going to use a group and getting directly from Jira.

[project_transition_id]

Set the Project and the transition ID. For example if you have multiples…

The repo has a Readme file, but basically you only need to set the environment variables and set-up the behavior of Jira.

You can define the id of the status across multiples projects, status to avoid, users to trait and how many days, from the "dueDate" check the tasks to update.

Thanks for read, I hope to come back after a few months and share the feedback on how this work for us.

Top comments (5)

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thepracticaldev profile image
dev.to staff

Just a heads up that if you use this syntax, you can share a preview of the repo:

{% github https://github.com/diegonalvarez/automated-tasks %}

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diegonalvarez profile image
Diego

Awesome, thanks for the tip, updated.

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hkcoyant profile image
Ariel coyant

Great work, thanks for sharing!

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_cpuk profile image
Christine

the link to the repo seems to be broken :(

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diegonalvarez profile image
Diego

Thanks ! Fixed now !