Software companies aim to deliver a high-quality product on time and under budget. This is where software testing becomes imperative to deliver a quality product. Software Testing is a systematic process of evaluating an application to identify defects, bugs, or deviations from the expected behaviour. It is fundamentally a process of verification and validation. For valid results, tests must be performed in environments that closely resemble the production environment, using similar infrastructure and data. High-quality products are never an accident; they are the result of deliberate, intelligent effort in development and testing.

Software Testing & STLC

Similar to the SDLC for creating software, there is STLC for Software testing, which needs to be followed by testing teams to ensure software quality. Skipping the testing phase can negatively impact both the product and the brand’s reputation. The six phases of STLC are: Requirement analysis, Test planning, Test case development, Environment setup, Test execution, Test cycle closure. The testing process is categorized into three primary levels as follows, moving from granular components to the entire system.

• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• System Testing/E2E test

Functional testing focuses on what the system does (features wrt requirements), while non-functional testing focuses on how it performs (speed, reliability and security). We have the Unit testing, Integration testing, System testing(E2E test), Interface testing, Regression testing and UAT under functional testing. While the documentation testing, installation testing, performance testing, reliability testing, security testing fall under non-functional testing.

Manual or Automation testing is utilized for the above based on strategic purpose. While manual testing is used in the areas where exploratory, human judgement and subjective human experiences are needed. On the other hand, automation testing is used where speed, reliability is needed. Even for repetitive tasks and complex end to end workflows Automation testing is used.

 AI-Powered Testing

AI can act as a Co-pilot to the tester in the following areas of STLC. This can be for Test case generation, Test automation scripts, Test data generation, Test maintenance, prioritisation, and exploratory testing ideas. It is important to note that blind copy-paste of AI output without human verification is dangerous. AI generated test cases can sometimes be broad but lack the necessary depth.

Playwright Framework & Tools

Playwright is a powerful and versatile automation library developed by Microsoft. It enables developers and testers to automate web applications across multiple browsers with ease. Playwright’s architecture is designed to provide a robust, flexible, and high-performance framework for browser automation. It is preferred over older frameworks like Selenium for writing end-to-end test automation scripts.

If you are using a Windows PC, select the necessary option/s and download the latest Node.js using the following link, which is a prerequisite for installing Playwright. Even npm installation is a prerequisite.

Download nodejs

Once the download and installation are complete, use the following commands to check whether it is installed properly or not. The commands can be used in the command prompt or in the Terminal section of VS Code IDE to verify the versions installed. Here, “npm” refers to Node Package Manager.

If you need to download and setup VSCode, use the following link to download and perform the installation.

Download VSCode

On VS Code, click on “Open Folder” to navigate to an existing folder or create a new one (ECOMWEBTEST) and Open it. We will now go through the following link for more details on playwright setup.

Installation | Playwright

As mentioned in the above link, the following command adds Playwright to the existing project/folder on VS Code if it is not yet setup. Once the following command is executed, you can see the folders/files as displayed in the below picture to get populated under the folder ECOMWEBTEST.

npm init playwright@latest

Test Case Generation

Now that we have set up Playwright in VS Code, let us use an AI tool (OpenAI/Claude etc) to generate Test cases for a sample scenario using the following prompt.

"Consider yourself as a QA testing expert. Generate detailed test cases for saucedemo.com login and checkout flow. Include positive and negative scenarios. I will be using playwright in order to test this."

After all the test cases are generated using the above prompt, we will move on to the execution of the test cases.

Test Case Execution

As you are inside the project folder on VS Code, you can refer to the below prompt result to gain insights on how to run the tests.

"I am inside a folder in VS Code. Guide me on how to run the tests listed above."

From the result of the prompt in the earlier section, copy and paste any one of the test cases into the code file. For example, let us copy the code for login test into the newly created code file under tests folder. The name of the file is set to saucedemo.spec.ts as shown in the below picture.

The code to test the login (generated by AI tool) is as follows. Check the code to confirm whether the website name is mentioned or not.

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';
test('Successful login with valid credentials', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https:www.saucedemo.com/');
  await page.fill('[data-test="username"]', 'standard_user');
  await page.fill('[data-test="password"]', 'secret_sauce');
  await page.click('[data-test="login-button"]');
  await expect(page).toHaveURL(/inventory.html/);
  await expect(page.locator('.inventory_item')).toHaveCount(6);
});

Execute the above code by using the following command.

npx playwright test tests/saucedemo.spec.ts --headed

Headed Mode enables testers to visually verify automated actions, such as typing and clicking. Whereas the other mode, i.e, Trace Viewer provides a step-by-step trace of every action for verification. Once you press the enter key, the code will automatically run and execute the login for multiple browsers (Chrome, Webkit and Firefox). On successful run, you will get the following output under the Terminal section.

In case the test is a success as shown above, move on to the next test case. Similar to the first test case, execute the code for other tests using different file names.

Further Reading:

• Maximize Your Potential : The AI Tools You Need to Know About
• Exploring LLMs and OCI Generative AI
• Agentic AI for Agile Teams: Smarter Reporting and Insights
• AI-Powered ITSM with n8n: Integrating Jira SM, OpenAI and Slack
• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced

According to the Scrum Guide, Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. In a nutshell, Scrum requires a Scrum Master to foster an environment where: A Product Owner orders the work for a complex problem into a Product Backlog. The Scrum Team turns a selection of the work into an Increment of value during a Sprint. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint.

Kanban is another popular way of implementing agile. It is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process. Instead of working in time-based sprints, work is continuously delivered in Kanban. It is about envisioning the existing workflow in terms of steps. These steps can be created on the whiteboard or in tools like Jira. The goal of the Kanban execution is to reduce work-in-progress items by ensuring work items move to the next steps quickly to realise business value faster.

Automating the tracking and reporting of Scrum or Kanban KPIs can eliminate the constant manual effort required to create and maintain filters, dashboards in tools like Jira. Instead of relying on regularly updating the filter & gadgets, a fully automated system can pull the right data at the right time, package key metrics such as lead time, throughput, sprint progress, and kanban board work-in-progress trends, along with the insights and send them directly to your inbox on a recurring schedule. This ensures teams always have accurate, timely insights without any dashboard upkeep, thus enabling faster decision-making, greater transparency, and continuous improvement with minimal overhead.

The Automation Workflow

You can refer to the following workflow to implement the automation using n8n tool. The workflow consists of the Schedule Trigger node, OpenAI Chat Model node, Jira nodes for each of the Scrum and Kanban boards, the Outlook node to send a message and the controller node,i.e, the AI Agent node which controls the whole workflow.

Let us go through the settings and functionality of each node as follows.

Schedule Trigger

The Schedule trigger node can be set to trigger the workflow based on the length of the sprint. In my previous blog, i had explained on how to navigate to select a node. For our scenario, the node is set to trigger the workflow once a week, i.e., on Monday at 9AM. In case of a 2-week sprint, we can get to know the status mid-sprint and at the end of the sprint.

Jira Software Tool – Scrum Board

The next node ,i.e, the “Jira Software Tool” node can be used to extract the data from a particular Jira board. Here, we are extracting the data from the Scrum board of the “Scrum project”. The following JQL can be set at the appropriate location (JQL section) in the node as shown in the picture below. The JQL will extract all the Stories, Tasks and Sub tasks from the active sprint that do not have any labels. The node has been renamed to Scrum by editing the default name “Create an issue in Jira Software”. Remember to connect this node to your Jira account with appropriate credentials. You can refer to my earlier blog for the details of connecting the node to your Jira account.

project = "Scrum project" AND sprint in openSprints() AND labels = EMPTY ORDER BY Rank ASC

Jira Software Tool – Kanban Board

The next node too is the “Jira Software Tool” node. Here, as we are extracting the data from a Kanban board, the following JQL can be used to extract all the issue types from the kanban board with labels “test”. The node name has been renamed to Kanban from the default name. You can refer to the input section in the node below to check the requested information from AI Agent node.

project = "Scrum project" AND labels in (test) ORDER BY Rank ASC

OpenAI Chat Model

We will be making use of the OpenAI Chat Model node, similar to the one used in the earlier blog. The settings to connect will be the same, but any other model can be selected from the list as well.

AI Agent

Each of the above nodes need to be connected to this AI Agent node as shown in the above workflow diagram. The prompt section (prompt text file attached below) needs to be input with the appropriate prompt so that the node requests the necessary information to each of the Jira nodes. The outputs from each of the Jira nodes will be further analysed using the OpenAI chat model node. Finally, the formatted output will be sent to the Outlook node that is mentioned in the next section.

Microsoft Outlook

In this final node ,i.e, Send a message node present under Microsoft Outlook node tree, we will first connect to our outlook or hotmail account using the credentials. Once the connection is done, set the Resource, Operation, To, Subject and Message sections appropriately. The Subject section will be the subject of the report mail to be sent. It will consist of the text “Sprint Insights Report” followed by the date and time. The Message section will consist of the output of the AI Agent node.

Once the settings are done and the “Execute workflow” is clicked, the workflow will be triggered and the stakeholder(s) set in the To section of the node will receive the following report mail. Since the outlook node is connected to your hotmail id, the same is used to send mail to the email id set under the To section (gmail id) of your node. In real scenario, there is no need to click on the execute workflow since the workflow will be triggered on a weekly basis by the Schedule Trigger node.

Verification

Now that we have got the report mail with information that is insightful, we can cross-verify the Story/Task/Subtask Summary or names, Assignee and Statuses from each of the Jira Scrum and Kanban boards directly for the correctness of data. Find the screenshot of the Jira Scrum board, Kanban board, Time Spent filter as follows. For the lead time part, refer to the above report “Kanban Board Output” section.

Jira Scrum Board

Jira Kanban Board

Jira Time Spent Filter

Further Reading :

• AI-Powered ITSM with n8n: Integrating Jira SM, OpenAI and Slack
• Optimizing Scrum in Jira: Board Filter, Automation and Dashboard
• Integrating Jira SM Alerts into Kanban Workflow
• Streamline Your Workflow with Jira Kanban Boards
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams

Currently, Opsgenie features are available natively in Jira Service Management. Thus, making it possible to access your operations work in the same place as the rest of your work is. Your Jira SM Teams page is the central hub for all operations work and configurations. You can add Jira SM members to responder teams here.

Using the Go to operations option you can configure settings w.r.t on-call schedules, integration, routing rules, and escalation policies at the team level. Hence, handling each alert differently based on its source and payload. You need to set up the integrations to get the alerts to come in. Jira SM integrates with various monitoring, logging, ticketing and chat tools.

Sync is a new feature that provides control over keeping alerts, issues, and requests synchronized. Here, you can control how and when Jira software issues and Jira SM service requests create alerts. Additionally, you can create workflows to define the conditions that trigger the generation of issues and requests in response to an alert.

Integration

You need to set up the integrations to get the alerts to come in. In our example, we will consider integrating with an application that can send emails which will trigger alert generation on Jira SM. Navigate to the concerned responder team (Test) below from Teams > Test.

Since we need to add a new integration, let us click on the option “Add integration” as shown in the above picture. This will take us to the following screen.

Select the application that you want to integrate to,i.e, Email application in our scenario. Clicking on Email icon above will take us to the following screen. Here, you can select a team under Assignee team section using the drop-down option. Since we have only the Test responder team now, we will select that and that specific team will receive alerts from this integration. Provide an appropriate integration name (TestX) as well.

Once the Continue button is pressed, the following screen will appear. Find the email address here that can be used for integration. Mailing to this email id will generate alerts on Jira SM.

The rules that you create for the integration as explained in the next section will work only if you turn on the integration. The status is turned ON in the above picture which indicates that the integration is ON. Jira SM creates an alert for each email sent to the specified email address as above. By default, email integration uses email subject as the alert message, and email body is put into the alert description field.

Since our final goal is to create a task on the Kanban board for the alert created, our next action would be to create a rule for the same under Syncs.

Syncs

Navigate to the Syncs section that is present just below the Integrations section. Click on the Create sync button at the top right to start creating rule(s) for the integration.

Select Create and update issues against alerts created by integrations or other syncs and select Add rule to set up a rule that creates an issue based on alert events caused by integration. Here, you can specify the conditions such that the status of the work event/issue created will reflect all the changes to the alert in Jira SM. This may include updating the comments in the work event and closing the work event based on the updation done to the alert(s).

However, the upper section, i.e., Rules for creating and processing alerts, can be used to create rules such that the alerts reflect the changes done to the Jira Software ticket. This may include updating the comments in the alert and closing the alert based on the updation done to the work event(s).

For the lower section ,i.e, the Rules for taking action against alerts section, the filter condition is set such that, if the Source section in the alert contains an entry of Email, then create a new Issue type of Task on Jira Software.

Under Default and mandatory fields customized, further settings can be done. The labels section is set to the source field in the alert which can be used for further filtering on Jira Software if needed.

Click on Save button and Turn on sync button to activate the rule.

Verification

Once you turn on the integrations and syncs, the next step would be test the whole setup. Send a mail to the email id specified earlier under integrations.

The subject of the mail is “Test mail alert” and the content of the mail is “test mail”. Alert(s) will appear under Teams>Alerts as follows. The summary/alert message as shown below is the subject of the mail as mentioned earlier.

The description of the alert contains the body of the mail as shown below.

We can also see that the Jira software issue is linked to the alert ticket. If you navigate to the software project that has only the kanban board, it will display all the issues created for that project. Moving the kanban board ticket to In Progress status will automatically change the alert ticket status from Open to acknowledged, and moving the ticket to Done on the kanban board will change the alert ticket status to Closed. This is possible, provided you have made the appropriate sync settings under Rules for creating and processing alerts.

Suppose we have one Kanban board and one Scrum board in the software project SWPRJ. We would need further filtering to display the appropriate task/story on either the Kanban or Scrum board. To display on the Kanban board, you need to filter the task/story under Configure board>General>Board filter>Edit filter query using the project name, labels etc. You can also make use of swimlanes to group different work items together.

Further Reference:

• Streamline Your Workflow with Jira Kanban Boards
• Integrating Service and Software Workflows on a Single Kanban Board
• Jira Service Management Forms: Enhancing User Experience
• Navigating Jira: From Basics to Advanced
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams

It is common to have multiple boards in a Jira project. However, each board needs to have a specific purpose associated with it. This may include, Service requests, Incident management, development activities and so on. Let us consider that our software project in Jira will have one Kanban board to visualize the service requests and routine activities. While the other board ,i.e, the scrum board handles development activities. Here we are leveraging a single kanban board to visualize both the service requests and routine activities in different swimlanes.

We have the queues section in Jira SM that can be used to organize issues based on certain criteria. This helps the Operations team member to find and prioritize the work efficiently. However, there are some limitations like ranking and re-organizing issues in queues that can be overcome with the display on kanban. Also, Kanban provides much better visibility and navigation on a single board. Both Jira Software and Jira SM licenses are required to utilize the features mentioned in this blog post. First, we will focus on the automation process used to generate the issues. The latter part will be about linking them to the Kanban board.

Automation

In this section we will get to know, how to create issues for routine activities that will be displayed on the kanban board. The issues are created through the automation feature. Just create a sample automation ticket by navigating to Project setting>Automation. As displayed in the below picture create a sample rule and enable it. The point to note here is that we are adding the label section to the rule so that the tickets created will have the label as “ABC”. In the below example, the automation creates tickets every x minutes with the label “ABC,” where x is set to 5m.

When the automation rule executes, it creates sample ticket(s) under the issues section of the software project, as shown in the picture below.

Sometimes, it may be necessary to generate Jira tickets for certain alerts on an alerting tool (Example: Ospgenie). Convert these alerts into Jira tickets and move them to the Kanban board. Jira SM allows you to set rules under Teams > “Team name” > Go to Operations, where the integration and sync settings can be configured. The sync rule settings can be configured to create a ticket under a software project that will appear on the Kanban board.

Integration to Kanban Board

Now, we have the user service requests in the Service Project (Support) and automated tickets for routine activities in the Software Project (Scrum project). The next step is to link them to the Kanban board in the software project. On the top right of the kanban board, click on the three dots to select the “Configure board” option. This will take you to the settings section of the Kanban board as shown below.

The filter query,i.e, the JQL macro includes both the Scrum project and Support project, and filters the issues labeled “ABC”. You can toggle between the JQL and Basic options to switch between direct JQL entry and manual selection modes. The below picture depicts the manual selection of options.

Complete the option selection and save the filter. The Kanban board links both project types. As a result, it displays all issue type statuses from the projects as cards under the Columns subsection, as shown below. The next step is to customize the columns on the Kanban board. This ensures that the system reflects both software and service workflows, and you can arrange all the status cards accordingly. The workflow for Task and Service Request issue types will be as follows:

• Software Workflow for Scrum project Task Issue type: “Open” → “In Progress” → “Closed”
• Service Workflow for Support Service Request Issue type: “Waiting For Support” → “In Progress” → “Resolved”

You will be able to see all Scrum project Tasks & Stories labeled “ABC” on the Kanban board. Similarly, the Support Service Requests labeled “ABC” will appear on the board. Under the Swimlanes subsection of the settings, select “Projects” as the grouping method. This will display your Kanban board based on each project, as shown below:

Our board is ready, and we can use it to move the issue types through the various column statuses on the Kanban board.

Further Reading :

• Streamline Your Workflow with Jira Kanban Boards
• Jira Service Management Forms: Enhancing User Experience
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams
• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Enterprise IT Infrastructure & Support

Scrum and kanban are both agile practices/frameworks. They have evolved over the years to address specific challenges around organizing work. In a kanban work cycle, the team takes another thing up as soon as one thing finishes. Kanban is better suited for continuous work, such as support and services. Here, the work is mostly a daily routine that is a one-time effort with no frequent stakeholder engagement. There is no provision to planning in Kanban, but the team can use their own approach on a need basis. One more point to note is that there are no roles like product owner, developer, scrum master in Kanban.

However, a more complex, iterative work, like a new product or feature development may be better done with scrum. Scrum has sprints within which work is executed in a PDCA cycle. Scrum has active stakeholder and customer involvement — at least once a sprint during a sprint review event. There are specific events for planning the whole sprint and each day in the sprint. Also, there are roles like Product owner, Developer and Scrum master in scrum.

Now that we have some basic understanding of a Kanban work cycle, let us visualize Kanban workflow on a Jira Kanban Board.

Creating a new Kanban board

Jira SM or a service project by default manages issues via queues within each project. However, the Jira boards(KANBAN/SCRUM) can be created and housed only in a software project or in your own profile. There is an option to combine multiple boards ,i.e, either more than one service project or a service project(s) and a software project(s). In our example, let us consider that a single service project ticket(s) is to be displayed on our sample kanban board. You can easily create a board on Jira in any of the following ways.

• From the sidebar, navigate to “Boards in scrum project” and click on the “Create board” option.
• From the top menu of “Your work”, select the “Boards” tab and click on “View all boards”. In the next screen click on the “Create board” button at the top right.

When you click on the Create board button, a pop up will appear that will provide the option to select either a Scrum or Kanban board. Since we are creating Kanban board, click on “Create a Kanban board”. In the following screen, you will see several options. You will select the second option, “Board from an existing project,” as you link the existing service project to the Kanban board.

On the next screen, as shown below, specify the board name, the project(s) to link to the board, and the location to save the board. Once all the details are provided, click the Create board button to create your new Kanban board.

Setting up the Kanban board

The service project to be linked was already specified in the earlier step. In case you need to link additional project(s) after creating the board, you can do so by navigating to Configure board > General > Board filter followed by clicking on “Edit filter query”. In the next screen as shown below you can include or exclude any project and add conditions to other sections of the issue type. Our service project has issue types like [System]Incident, [System]Service Request, [System]Service Request with approvals, Task & Sub task.

Once the service project is added, we need to mirror the board columns with the service project ticket status(s). For this, you need to first confirm the statuses that will be used in your selected issue type workflow. A workflow can be used by multiple issue types in a project. In our scenario, we have considered that one issue type uses all the statuses of the workflow and another one uses it partially. Of the many statuses available in the workflow, our service request issue type uses specific statuses. These include Waiting for support, In progress, and Resolved/Cancelled.

Accordingly, let us setup the board with the columns by navigating to ellipsis>Configure board>Columns. Here you can set the name of the columns appropriately and move the status setting cards to the appropriate column. The Kanban board now automatically aligns service project tickets in various statuses to their respective columns on the board. You can set the minimum and maximum number of cards allowed in a specific column on the board.

Navigating on Kanban board

Our final board after integration with the service project will look as follows.

In order to better understand the status of the three tickets on the board, you can refer to the earlier workflow. The board maps the TODO status to the Waiting for support status, IN PROGRESS to the In progress/Pending/Waiting for customer/Escalated status. Lastly, the DONE status is mapped to Resolved/Cancelled statuses in the workflow. Each issue type can be specified a workflow on Jira. For our request type ticket (Emailed request) SR0, “In Progress” is the subsequent status to the current “Waiting for support” status.

To prioritize or group tickets on the board, right-click on the ticket and select the appropriate option to flag it for prioritization or label it for grouping. Click on the “Label” drop-down option at the top of the board to filter the group of tickets by the label name.

Just drag and drop the tickets from one column to another and the status of the tickets will change automatically in the service project too.

Further Reading:

• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams
• Jira Service Management Forms: Enhancing User Experience
• ITSM and System Management Tools : A Basic Guide
• JP1/ITDM2 : A Basic Guide

In your service project, agents can raise different request types, such as “Get IT help” or “Suggest improvement,” among others. These are visible on the customer portal and are the means through which customers interact with the service desk. They are user-friendly and enable your agents to assist customers more effectively by automatically sorting requests into the correct IT service management work category (Service requests, Incidents, Problems, Changes, or Post-incident reviews). Each request type is based on an issue type, and a single issue type can be the basis for many different request types.

Features

When Jira admins or project admins add a form as part of a request type, it’ll appear as one form for customers to fill out when they raise a request. Doing this lets you include conditional sections, rich formatting, and custom layouts to forms. Some of the beneficial features of forms that you can make use of is as follows.

• Enhance your requests by attaching forms to request types. You can create a native form that appears on the portal with the limited options available on request types. To enhance your requests with various options, use forms and attach them to request types. You can either create a form from scratch or make use of the existing templates.
• The dynamic forms feature helps to create forms that use conditional logic to dynamically show or hide fields, and add headings, tables, and rich formatting.
• Add external resources, utilize the slash (‘/’) command feature. On the service desk portal home page, you can specify the documents or reference links under the title Related resources. In some cases, you would like to specify links directly on the form that you are working on. In such cases, you can use the slash command, commonly found in Confluence, in the forms to display a similar menu. You can select the link option from the dropdown to add links directly to your form.
• Allow users to edit their tickets after submission with the agents help. Editing is possible as long as the option “Lock this form once it’s submitted so only admins can edit” is disabled. Then agents can reopen the ticket and navigate to the following section in the ticket,i.e. , Attached forms > Three dots > Open customer edits option. This will enable the customer edits.
• Allow the users to edit the tickets anytime on their own. To allow this, the “Keep this form open for edits” option should be enabled in the form settings. After submitting the ticket, the form will continue to be in the Open status and the customer will be able to edit it at any moment. When the customer finishes updating the form, they must save it for the changes to be reflected on the created ticket.
• Use the “Save a PDF version of this form each time it’s resubmitted” to keep track of any changes to the resubmitted form. This is helpful to review the modification history of an issue over time.
• Collect more information by attaching forms to issues. Internal and external links. You can add forms to existing issues (Example: Service requests, Incidents, Changes etc. ) and choose to make them either internal or external(Visible to customer). You can use them to request more information from customers or to complete internal processes as the issue progresses.
• Create issues using a link to a form. You can create issues using a link that goes directly to a form without needing to navigate to the portal. This allows your team to quickly create requests on your customers behalf, share the link with others, or embed into a Confluence page for quick reference.

Create a request type

Let’s create a request type and then attach a form that was created separately. To start using forms, from your service project select Project settings, then select Request types. To view the Project settings, you need to be either a project administrator or a Jira administrator.

While creating a new request type you need to specify the Name, Portal group and issue type. The description section is optional. In our scenario, since it is an incident we will choose the issue type as incident.

Once you click on the Add button, following is the screen that appears. Here you can edit the sections of the form that is visible to the user or customer. You can drag and drop any of the suggested fields on the right side to the left side. Since we will be needing the attachment field we will be dragging it to the left. The form that we will create later can be added here, which will enhance the features of this native form.

Create a form

To start creating a form, navigate to the Forms section under project setting and click on the Create form button drop-down option. Select the appropriate option to create a new form from either the blank one or from an existing template.

If we are creating a new form from a blank one, click Create blank to see the below form appear. The options available are indicated in red. The top left rich text format section, the top right Add section button, the Add field button are all marked in red. In the content of the form, enter slash to display a list of options available that can further enhance the form features.

Now that we’re familiar with some basic features for getting started with forms, let’s create a simple form. The final form should appear as follows.

Since we have already created the request type, we will create a form that will enhance the request type sections (till Summary) to appear as above . First step would be to create a blank form by click on the Create form > Create blank option. Let us name the form as “Cybersecurity incident details”. The “Name of the user” section can be created using the Long text option under Add field. Since the red star mark is there, it will be a mandatory section to be entered. Refer to the below screenshot on where and how to set the fields.

Similarly for next text box ,i.e., the “PC model number”, all the steps will be the same, expect for the selection under Add field. Here you will be selecting Short text instead of Long text option.

The next section is the Maker name which is a drop down option. For this, under the Add field select the Dropdown field. Enter the Display name and Choices as displayed in the below screenshot.

The following section will be the start of the dynamic form section wherein we will use the “Radio buttons” option under Add field to decide on which section to display in the latter end of the form. If Yes option is selected one form will be displayed and if No is selected another form will be displayed.

In order to start using the dynamic form, first click on the Add section button. Fill out the sections as shown in the below picture ,i.e, Name, Show section, When field, Is any of. As you can see from the below picture that the Show section, When field and Is any of: fields are drop down sections. Select the appropriate option inorder to map to the earlier radio button query and answer ,i.e, either Yes or No. The below screenshot depicts the section to be displayed when “Yes” option is selected.

The text box below is the “Provide the details of incident”, which needs to be added from the Add field section by selecting the Paragraph option.

Now that only the “No” option form remains, click the Add section button again to create the form that appears when the “No” radio button is selected.

The sections below are the Date & Time , Paragraph fields available under Add field section. Name these sections appropriately so that they display correct names as above when the “No” option is selected. .

Once all sections are complete, click the Save changes button at the bottom to save the form.

Attach form to request type

To attach the form created earlier to the request type created much earlier, navigate to the Settings tab to the top left of the screen. Here we can link our form to the request type. Please refer to the image below for details on the option that needs to be enabled. One more way to attach a form to the request type would be to navigate to the request type that we created earlier and use the Attach form button.

The next step would be to access the form from the portal. For this, you need to navigate to the Channels > Portal option as shown in the screenshot below.

Further Reading :

• Microsoft Forms : Getting Started Guide
• Useful Microsoft Outlook Tips & Tricks
• AppSheet : The No-code App Development Platform
• Data Visualization : MS Excel Dashboard Basics
• Data Visualization : Google Data Studio Dashboard Basics

You can segregate Jira automation into automation rules by using a simple no-code rule builder, which creates automation rules to handle everything from the simplest repetitive tasks to the most complex scenarios. The other type of automation combines the filter feature, which uses JQL, with the subscription feature, where you set conditions to send automated emails.

To access the section wherein you create the automation rules, navigate to the Project settings > Automation > Rules section. Following are some of the automation rules that i have created. This can be particularly useful if you are working on an Agile scrum project.

Sync the status of Subtask to Story and Story to Epic

This automation rule will be useful when the status of a subtask or story changes to In progress and the parent story or epic is in ToDo or Done status. This rule ensures the parent story/epic status syncs with the subtask/story status.

The automation rule consists of steps A-E. Find the details of each step as follows.

Create Subtask with a single click

You can use this automation rule to create a subtask with a single click. An optional step allows you to inform any concerned person about the created new subtask.

After setting the automation rule, a new section appears under “Actions” with the rule name, as shown in the picture below.

This automation rule consists of steps F-H. The settings required for each step are displayed in the picture below. The step H shows the smart value that can be used when you want to display the issue URL in the mail.

Sync the status of Story to Epic

You can use this automation rule to automatically change the status of an epic to “Done” when the status of all its stories changes to “Done.”

You can implement the steps I-M involved in the above rule using the following settings.

Move unassigned Subtask/Story to ToDo from Inprogress

You can use this rule to ensure that all subtasks and stories are assigned before changing their status to “In Progress”. If someone moves an unassigned subtask or story to “In Progress,” the system will move it back to “To Do.” It will include a comment with the current time, issue summary, and the text: “No Assignee added.”

This automation rule involves steps N-Q. The detailed settings for each step are displayed in the picture below. Step Q shows the smart values you can use to display the current time and issue summary.

Check the work log entry and mail assignee

Unlike the other automation rules, you create this one by navigating to Filters > View all filters and clicking on Create filter. The following filter will help you to filter out all the subtasks that have not been updated in the past one day. I found that the issuetype = Sub-task does not filter any subtask in the Jira free tier but does filter out subtasks in the standard version.

After filtering, the next step is to automate sending an email to each assignee. To do this, navigate to Filter details and select Add subscription.

In the next screen, you can select the Recipients as Personal Subscription if you would like to set a mail reminder to yourself. There are other options under Recipients that can be selected if applicable. If you want to add a new group under Recipients you need to have the admin access.

You can customize options like Schedule and Interval as needed. Once you set the subscription, you can add two or more subscriptions to the same filter.

In this blog post, i have provided the above automation examples. However, if you want to explore more on automation rules you can refer to templates that is present under Project settings > Automation > Templates section. One more useful feature is the audit log. You can review an audit log for each of your rules to see when the rule was triggered, the final result of the execution, and any actions that were performed.

Further Reading :

• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Transform Your Task Management with Microsoft Tools
• Advanced Microsoft Outlook Tips and Tricks
• OneNote : Basic to Advanced Guide
• Getting Started With Canva’s Powerful Features