Team-managed board rules

This page describes each of the board rules you can add to your team-managed projects and gives an example of why you might want to use one. Learn how to add a rule to your team-managed project board.

Assign a work item to someone

This rule helps ensure that the right people address the right work items at the right time. It takes the manual work out of assigning a team member after a stage in the workflow is complete.

Jira can change the work item’s assignee automatically when you move a work item between columns or change its status:

1. Use the For work items moving to dropdown to tell Jira the column or status that updates the work item’s assignee field.

2. Nominate the person who you want to assign the work item to in the Assign to dropdown.

You can assign work items to:

• The reporter, usually the person who created it

• The current user, or the person updating the work item’s status

• No one, making the work item unassigned

• A specific person in your project

Example

Multi-discipline teams usually hand off tasks at different stages in their process. For example, a small feature team may have these columns on their board:

To do → In design → In development → In review → Done

You can create rules to assign work items to each discipline across the board:

• For work items moving to In design, assign to the team's designer. They then provide implementation details, specifications, and requirements.

• For work items moving to In development, assign to the team's feature lead. They then write the code or delegate to other developers in the team.

• For work items moving to In review, assign to the team's quality assurance champion. They then provide testing notes or build automated quality tests.

• For work items moving to Done, unassign the work item.

Update a work item field

This rule helps ensure that work items capture the right information at the right time. You can reduce data entry errors and increase consistency.

Jira can update certain fields for you automatically when you move work items between columns or change their status:

1. Use the For work items moving to dropdown to tell Jira the column or status that updates a certain field. 

2. Choose which field you want to update automatically.

You can update any text, number, label, date, or time fields you’ve added to your project, including custom fields. Learn more about custom fields.

A few nuances:

• When you update a text field using a rule, Jira adds the desired text to existing text in the field. It won’t replace any existing text in the field.

• When you update a time or date field, Jira replaces anything in the field with the date and/or timestamp of when the card was moved on the board. You can’t specify a static time or date.

Example

Multi-discipline teams usually hand off tasks at different stages in their process. For example, a small feature team may have these columns on their board:

To do → In design → In development → In review → Done

For traceability and reporting, teams might add custom date fields to their work types to track hand-off dates:

• Picked up by design

• Handed to development

• Handed to QA champion

They can create simple rules that update these hand-off date fields to the current date of when someone moves the work item to a certain column or status:

• For work items moving to In design, update the Picked up by design field to the current date/time.

• For work items moving to In development, update the Handed to development field to the current date/time.

• For work items moving to In review, update the Handed to QA champion field to current date/time.