Can I have an issue clone on another board close the original issue?
Asked by Steven Theodoor Bosman-Romein:

Hello everyone,

On my board, some issues are created that should be fixed by another team (on another board). So I am trying to create automations which can support this:

1. an automation that creates a clone of an issue on board 2, if an issue is created on board 1 by a certain person
2. an automation that changes the status of an issue on board 1, if the status of the issue clone on board 2 changes (specifically: if the issue on board 2 is closed)

I am trying to do the automations from board 1, because I am not an admin on board 2. But I cannot find a way to change an issue on my own board (board 1) based on a trigger from board 2. Is there any way to do this, or do I need to ask an admin of board 2 to create an automation for that?


Answers:
author: Bill Sheboy
body: Hi [@Steven Theodoor Bosman-Romein](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5424524) -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First, let's align on some terminology to help understand your scenario...

* Jira **projects** contain **issues**, such as Story, Epic, etc.
* A project can contain **boards** , which are a *view to issues in the project* based on a saved **JQL filter**. But the issues are in a project, not in a specific board.
* From what you describe, I suspect you are using a Company-managed project, which can have multiple boards...each with a different saved filter
* To change / add issues to appear on a specific board, the fields of the issue are set to match the filter.
  * For example, if the different teams have boards, and use a different value in the Components field to distinguish them, changing the value will change on which board the issue appears.
* Automation rules for a project act on the entire project, and not on a single board. (There are global and multiple-project scope rules, but that seems different from your question.)

If this all seems to match your case, back to your question: your rule is cloning an issue and you want it displayed on a particular board in a project. To do that, the rule must set the issue fields to match the filter for desired board.

The community can help confirm this if you post an image of your complete automation rule, an image of the audit log details showing the rule execution, and the specifics of the filters for the different boards.

Please note: if instead your different boards are in different Jira projects, we will be able to see that from your rule's clone issue action. Then we can investigate what is not working as expected.

Kind regards,  
Bill

comments: author: Steven Theodoor Bosman-Romein
body: Hi [@Bill Sheboy](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1685313) thanks so much for your in-depth reply! You are right, I should have been a bit more specific.

My question is related to 2 projects, both company managed. What I am looking for is a way to:

1. create issues in Project A
2. have some issues in Project A copied over to Project B (based on who created the issue in Project A)
3. when the issue status in Project B changes, of only the issues that were copied over from Project A:
   1. set the status of the original issue in Project A to match that of the copy issue in Project B

I think step #2 is easily done by cloning the issue in Project A to Project B, if the issue was created by a certain user.

However, I am not sure about step 3. I am trying to automate that from Project A as well, because I am not an admin of Project B. But there seems to be no automation trigger "when linked issue status changed" (I can only see automation triggers for "when linked design updated".

Does that explain the situation better?

Many thanks!

Steven


author: Bill Sheboy
body: Thanks for clarifying, Steven!

What you describe for step #3 is **possible with a global or multiple-project scope rule**. Your Jira Site Admin will need to create a rule at that scope.

I wonder...from your original question it seems the problem you are trying to solve is:
> Our team sometimes discovers work in our backlog that is owned by another team's areas of responsibility. We want to transfer that work to the other team, and have visibility to their progress on the item. (It is unclear if there are dependencies upon the progress of the transferred work item.)

How does this compare to what you believe the problem to be?

You do not state if the teams are using Scrum, Kanban, or one of each board / practice type. And having another team's work on your board can cause coordination, planning, and reporting challenges...more so for Scrum than Kanban in Jira.

Perhaps instead consider other ways to solve this. After transferring the work item to the other team...

* remove the dependencies between the teams, such that there is no need to watch their work
* have a scrum-of-scrums standup periodically to see / manage such work; this could use a separate board which shows all work, and is treated as read-only
* ask the team to inform you of progress
* go look at their board to see the progress
* create a separate board *in your project*, using a saved filter, which specifically shows those items; these could be tagged some way to make them visible, such as with labels

What do you think of these other approaches?


author: Steven Theodoor Bosman-Romein
body: Hi [@Bill Sheboy](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1685313) great to know that our Jira site admins can create this rule. I will work with them on that.

Regarding your questions and suggestions: I agree this isn't proper form, and that's because the jira projects are not used for strictly agile development. Project B does development, but also processes support requests via jira, including use creation in a certain system. The automation is meant to have someone in project A create a story for user creation (or something related), have that copied to project B to be fixed, and then have it closed in project A.

You could very well argue that jira is not meant for this, but it's what was chosen :)

Thanks so much for your help!


author: Bill Sheboy
body: Hi [@Steven Theodoor Bosman-Romein](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5424524)

Just checking if this answered your question. If so, please mark this one as "answered" to help others find solutions faster. If not, provide any additional information to help the community provide suggestions.

Thanks!