Transition a work item with automation

The Transition work item action will allow your automation rule to transition work items automatically.

However, when transitioning a work item using automation, you may run into the following error:

While this error message can indicate that the status doesn't exist, it often means something different.

Transitions must follow workflows

When creating a rule to transition a work item, the transition must follow the space’s workflow. Learn more about working with workflows.

Take the following workflow for investigating and handling bugs – this workflow will restrict what can be done with the Transition work item action.

For example, take a rule with a manual trigger that comments when a bug is a duplicate, and then closes it by transitioning to Done – this rule would not successfully execute on work items that are in the Awaiting triage state, as work items can only proceed to Under investigation from this status.

A rule run on a work items in this state will result in an error status.

This rule, however, will run successfully on Under Investigation and In Progress work items as the workflow allows transitions from these statuses to Done.

Rule actors need the correct permissions

The rule actor is the user who executes a rule. This user must have the relevant permissions to trigger the rule, and complete any actions that may be performed. Learn more about the rule actor.

Using the previous example, the details of the transition from Selected for development to In progress shows that there is a condition in place, so that only members of the developers group can execute this transition.

The Automation app user rule actor cannot be added to these user groups. You will need to configure any transition conditions with space roles in order to provide the appropriate permissions. By default, the automation rule actor is in the atlassian-addons-space-access role.

Learn more

See other Jira automation use cases in our Jira automation template library.