As project managers, our goal is to maintain a smooth and efficient workflow, especially when it comes to release management. Merging tasks into the master branch is a critical part of the software development lifecycle, and ensuring that these tasks are part of the upcoming release—or identifying when they are not—is essential for a coherent release process. With Jira’s automation features, we can streamline this process. Let’s explore how to set this up step by step.
Setting Up Your Jira Automation Rule
Step 1: Create a New Rule Go to your Jira project and select ‘Project settings’. Under ‘Project settings’, find ‘Automation’ (you might need to have admin rights to access this feature). Click on ‘Create rule’.
Step 2: Choose a Trigger For our use case, we want to act when a pull request is merged. So, select ‘Pull request merged’ as the trigger.
Step 3: Define Issue Field Conditions After a pull request is merged, we need to check if the merge is related to an issue that should be in the upcoming release. To do this, add a new component ‘Edit issue fields’ and select ‘Merged to Master’. Make sure to create this custom field in Jira.
Step 4: Set Up Conditional Logic We need to compare the fixed versions of the issue with a regular expression to see if it matches the pattern expected for the release.
For tasks expected in the release, use the condition: {{issue.fixVersions}} contains regex(A[0-9]{1,2}-9[0-9]{1,2}(\.0[1-9]|\.1[0-2])|(\.0[1-9]|\.1[0-9]|\.2[0-9])$)
If this condition is true, you will ‘Send Slack message’ stating: “A ticket that is in the release has been merged into master. Please confirm.”
Step 5: Handle Exceptions For tasks that are merged but are not expected in the upcoming release, set another condition to catch these instances: {{issue.fixVersions}} does not match regex(A[0-9]{1,2}-9[0-9]{1,2}(\.0[1-9]|\.1[0-2])|(\.0[1-9]|\.1[0-9]|\.2[0-9])$)
If this condition is true, you will ‘Send Slack message’ stating: “A ticket that is NOT in the release has been merged into master. Please confirm.”
Step 6: Finalize Your Rule Give your rule a name, such as “PR Merge to Master Marker”, and set the ‘Scope’ to the relevant project. Assign an owner who will receive notifications if the rule fails, and choose an ‘Actor’, which is usually ‘Automation for Jira’.
Step 7: Test and Activate Before activating, test your rule to ensure it works as expected. Once confirmed, activate the rule by toggling the ‘Enabled’ switch.
Why This Matters
Automating this process:
- Reduces the manual effort to track which tasks are part of the upcoming release.
- Minimizes the risk of deploying features that are not ready or have not been included in the release notes.
- Notifies team members promptly, allowing for quick action if something has been merged incorrectly.
Conclusion
Automations in Jira are powerful tools that can significantly improve your team’s efficiency and accuracy, especially when managing releases. With the above steps, you can set up a robust automation rule to monitor and notify about the state of issues in your master branch. Embrace these automations and let them take over some of the heavy liftings in your project management processes.