Automation is one of your most valuable tools for increasing efficiency and getting more done faster. Many teams chose Jira to track their team's efforts and progress. To accelerate their efforts, automation has become a crucial element to help them achieve their goals faster.
Creating issues is a day-to-day task that can unfortunately be very time-consuming when you do it manually. In this post, we'll explore how to automate the process of issue creation in Jira, explore its advantages, and show you different options to automate the Jira issue creation process.
Jira issue creation
Jira issues are a representation of a project task, a request, a feature, or a bug, which can be tracked. The issues provide crucial information and specifications such as priority level, status, deadlines or timelines, etc.
There are different ways you can create a Jira issue:
- From the top navigation bar
- On the backlog
- On your board (team-managed projects only)
What’s more, you can also create subtasks, set estimates, order your existing issues by priority, and flag or filter the issues.
However, all of these things when done manually consume plenty of time - filling in all the fields by hand, calculating estimates, and inputting data may be wasting your time. This is why automation is crucial in finding some extra time and capacity.
The benefits of automating Jira issues
Automating Jira ticket creation can significantly enhance productivity and reduce manual work with daily tasks in Jira. Let's look at a few common use cases illustrating what could be automated there to achieve efficiency and better output
- Reduced errors - Performing anything by hand introduces the risk of human error. Inputting a date wrong or assigning it to the wrong person or project happens all the time. Automation lowers these risks as it is based on algorithms and existing data. This ensures accuracy and consistency.
- Saved time - Automation frees up team members' time to concentrate on more value-added tasks. Teams may meet deadlines more easily, complete projects more efficiently, and address problems faster when repetitive processes are automated.
- Increased collaboration and adaptability - Real-time notifications, decreased amount of bottleneck situations, or more visibility in processes and their management all contribute to better team collaboration and greater adaptability.
- Improved security - Automation decreases the number of people necessary to create issues or customize the issue creation screen. This also means less unauthorized personnel and reduced risk of errors or cybersecurity threats.
There are many others that can be included, such as reduced costs, streamlined workflows, more consistency and efficiency, and fewer administrative worries.
How to automate Jira issues
Let’s look at some concrete scenarios to understand what parts of the Jira ticket creation can be automated (and why you would want to automate).
- Automate ticket creation based on workflow transition
You’re onboarding a new employee, and instead of adding the same subtasks every time you have a new joiner, you automate the process. If someone creates a new issue called “John Doe onboarding,” you can leverage post functions to automatically generate subtasks such as “set up user account,” “get laptop,” “set up email,” and “enroll to security training.” - Bulk-automate ticket creation
You’re in charge of a major IT system migration involving 50 servers for which you need to track and manage configurations, tests, and updates. Rather than manually replicating each issue for every server, you can define a standardized template for existing server-related issues and effortlessly generate all 50 issues at once. - Set up a validation before a ticket is created
As a software development team, you want to make sure designated project leads handle the project planning. So you want to limit the creation of ‘Epic’ issues to project leads, while enabling average users to create ‘Bug’ issue types only. You can do this by implementing a validation rule that verifies the selected issue type before users can create a new issue. - Schedule the issue creation
Managing recurring tasks (like quarterly reporting) gets much easier when you use automation to generate issues at predefined intervals. For example, if you’re responsible for producing a quarterly performance report, you can automate the task creation at the end of each quarter. - Customize the issue creation screen
You’re working with large cross-functional teams and need to tailor issue creation screens based on user permissions and roles. If Team A and Team B have different requirements, you can customize their respective issue creation screens (so Team A sees different required fields than Team B). Both teams work more efficiently because things are set up the way they prefer. - Auto-fill certain fields during issue creation
Another common use case is to auto-fill field values based on the user selection. In the onboarding example, if someone specifies that a new employee is based in Europe, Jira can auto-populate the ‘Laptop Source’ field with ‘E.U. Warehouse’ instead of ‘U.S. Warehouse.’
Jira’s built-in automation is useful for getting started with automating your issue creation. But you might bump up against execution limits on Jira Cloud, especially when handling frequent ticket or subtask creations. To overcome these constraints and to build more advanced automations for creating issues, you can use Atlassian Marketplace apps.
Top automation apps for streamlining issue creation
To help you navigate the options, we've listed some of the top automation apps that can effectively streamline and automate the issue creation process.
The fast and easy no-code workflow automation app JSU is ideal for using workflow transitions to trigger the automatic creation of new Jira issues. You can even decide under what circumstances you want these issues to be created.
Bulk cloning app Clone Plus is handy for creating multiple Jira tickets simultaneously. You can also make templates for Jira tickets to easily replicate predefined structures and content when generating new Jira tickets.
JMWE is excellent for configuring automation rules using Jira expressions or easy-to-use scripting, enabling the automatic creation of tickets in response to predetermined events.
Power Scripts enables advanced automations, including event-based on scheduled issue creation, customization of the issue screens based on user permissions, and external system integration for ticket creation based on external triggers.
Now that you've gained insight into the essence of Jira tickets and the advantages of integrating automation (and how easy it is to do), you're ready to explore the possibilities within the Jira ecosystem. If you’re looking for more automation apps or looking for a partner to support you with implementing new solutions and optimizing Jira, we’re here for you.
