Housekeeping in Jira: Automation Library

Key Takeaways

• Lock down and review — restrict who can build automations, then use the Global Automation section to catalog and fix failing flows
• Document and consolidate — track what your global and multi-space automations do, then merge duplicate space-level flows where it makes sense
• Back it up — export complex flows to a file share or Git repo, since Jira has no built-in version history

The automation library is a no man’s land of potential chaos. It’s an easily ignored section of Jira that has huge potential to save your team time for repeatable tasks.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently in the automation side of Jira. I frequently end up getting pulled in to fix a broken automation. Automations can be really complex and building out the correct logic for a flow digs back into my developer days complete with running flows manually and adding audit log messages to get details on what’s actually happening. It can be a slow and tedious process especially when you start working towards the 65 step limit. There also isn’t room for documentation within the steps of the flow so understanding how something works requires stepping into the mind of someone else.

Because of these realities of automations in Jira, it’s easy to see how quickly you can find yourself with a mess. It’s even harder when someone else built the flow and you’re trying to get it working again.

At some point, you’re going to end up doing some cleanup in your Automation library.

The first part of the automation cleanup I would recommend is setting up the Global configuration for Automation permissions. This lets you decide which combination of groups and space administrators can create automations. By default, you need Space Administrator permissions but this is a broad permission set so it’s worth being explicit on which subset of space administrators can build automations. I’ve seen curious users write automations that overwrite fields based on triggers and run them against their whole projects. With no built-in backup and restore, that field level data was lost. This permission setup lets you segment users that have the capability to work with automations and understand the potential repercussions of their work.

The automation global configuration found under Settings -> System -> Global Automation

Be careful not to block this useful tool for technical and capable members of your team. Someone curious and slightly technical could really help your team discover the time-saving benefits of automations. Don’t gatekeep the tool but provide training, examples and governance to this capability.

Next, an administrator should go through and review failing automations in the Global Automation section of their admin. This view offers filters for automations with “some errors” or “failure” statuses. Cataloging what’s not working will help you review and prioritize what to address, by project. You’ll need to review each erroring flow and dig into the steps presented in the audit log. Some may be partially failing with most data getting updated. Others may be completely broken. Just shut off the ones that are completely failing until you have time to fix it.

After you’ve completed the error and failures review, take some time to document your working Global automations. Anything that is running against all project spaces in your system should be clearly understood by you and the project teams. Only Jira administrators can set up Global and Multiple Space flows. In my experience, that still leads to a lot of misunderstood setups. These global flows use your automation credit allowance so it’s important to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. I would suggest writing up a wiki page in Confluence and sharing across the team so there is shared understanding of the automation flows running against their work.

Things to look for in your global and multiple spaces flows:

1. Review whether a global flow is necessary. To prevent issues, should it be scoped to specific projects? Or does it only need to run against one project?
2. Review flow triggers - can these be scoped down with conditions to prevent them running when not needed?
3. Review field changes - what data is getting updated and why?

Lastly, review your global automations list across all projects and find abandoned automations. Look for the flows that are disabled. Ones that haven’t been updated in months. I tend to be aggressive with these cleanups and if it’s a relatively easy flow to recreate and hasn’t run in months, delete it.

While you’re doing this review, look for opportunities to consolidate automations into multi-space or global flows. Because non-admins can only build within their space, your users tend to reinvent the wheel across their projects. It will simplify maintenance to pull these together under the ownership of the admin for flows that don’t need to be updated by the team.

As a bonus, I would encourage exporting your complex flows, especially your global and multi-space flows.

There is no version history in automation flows so reverting to a previous version is not possible. A simple option would be to create a folder and toss them in your favorite file share (Dropbox, SharePoint, OneDrive). If you’re a little more technical, I highly recommend a Git repository on Bitbucket or GitHub. These systems give you the best visibility into changes made and an easy way to revert. This backup is a little more manual effort each time you make a change but it just takes one mistake on a flow to lose hours of work.

Jira automations can get really complex and it’s easy for them to get out of hand with a mixture of non-technical users alongside the endless capabilities the automation system allows.

It’s a place my background as an operational leader, developer and Atlassian admin has me uniquely equipped to make sense of the setup and get it working right. I’ve discovered AI is only mildly helpful because it mixes up the capabilities of the API, JQL searches, and automation smart values.

This is an area where you need an expert that understands systems, Jira, and how teams work. If your team is struggling with automating work in Jira, reach out and I'll help you sort it out.

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