Beyond the basics: how Agile Digital Solutions craft complex Jira Cloud automation for clients
For 3 years, Agile Digital Solutions has been working with Atlassian Jira and Confluence as core technologies for delivering tailor-made BizOps (business operations) solutions to clients, driven by the versatility, flexibility, scalability and stability of Atlassian's Cloud platform.
Although Jira is predominantly an agile project management solution, its advanced workflow functionality makes it possible to cater for nearly any workflow scenario in the hands of the right expert.
"As with any technology platform, there can be limitations and tradeoffs," says Ben van den Berg, founder of Agile Digital Solutions. "Fortunately, Atlassian established a healthy technology ecosystem for their cloud platforms, allowing independent add-on suppliers to provide additional functionality that complements the native platform."
Which app does Ben and the team reach for to address the limitations and thresholds of Jira's automation functionality and allow Agile Digital Solutions to meet their clients' complex BizOps and automation needs on Jira?
If we had to choose only one Jira plugin, it would be ScriptRunner because it is a multi-purpose tool that fills the gaps where we need more flexibility and functionality. It is a critical add-on that provides Jira with versatility beyond my expectations. We are grateful to have such a powerful tool at our disposal.
Ben van den Berg
Founder, Agile Digital Solutions
ScriptRunner offers comprehensive customisation, search, and reporting functionalities in a single package in addition to the unlimited (regardless of a company's Jira Cloud plan) and advanced automations that it is best known for.
How ScriptRunner facilitates the complex
While the Atlassian platform provided a robust foundation, Ben and his team encountered limitations with Jira's built-in automation capabilities, especially when dealing with complex workflows and large volumes of data. The native Jira Cloud automation functionality proved ideal for basic automation tasks, but it was less well suited for the more intricate and complex automation needs of the BizOps solutions their clients require.
When Agile Digital Solutions turned to ScriptRunner, the leading Jira automation tool, to overcome the limitations of native Jira Cloud Automation, they were able to provide fully customised Jira experiences that adapted to their customer's business requirements, offering a sense of relief from the constraints of the native system. Agile Digital Solutions was kind enough to share their favourite things about ScriptRunner and how it has enabled them to fully utilise the Jira Cloud platform and meet the complexities of business operations.
Ensuring that routines always complete in full, regardless of licence
Ensuring that automation sequences reflect the real-life process
Ensuring that automations meet the real-life process requirements
Founder Ben shared details about how they facilitate working with complex processes and external systems inside Jira, using ScriptRunner to allow for seamless operations management. With their BizOps solutions, Agile Digital Solutions provides a complete financial system, including costing, billing, inventory, banking, and accounting functionality all in a single Jira instance. Solutions like this are standard, enabling their clients to operate their businesses completely in a single, well-structured, and efficient solution.
Ensuring that routines always complete in full, regardless of licence
"Native Jira Automation limited the number of times a company could execute automation rules every month," says Ben, "depending on the Jira Cloud plan. Yet upgrading from the Jira Standard plan to Premium wasn't financially viable for many of our clients." This drove his team to find a different way of automating Jira for their client solutions.
"Some clients would unknowingly exceed automation thresholds," Ben continues. "This led to partial calculations being performed, which often resulted in financial losses to their businesses." The team explored options for solving this business-critical issue, looking at both Atlassian Marketplace and other platforms in search of an approach that would allow them to reliably execute the calculations and other automation functionality every time without thresholds.
Discovering ScriptRunner solved this problem for our clients: we knew that their automations would always be triggered when needed, and that their routines would be completed in full.
Ben van den Berg
Founder, Agile Digital Solutions
Ensuring that automation sequences reflect the real-life process
In Jira's native automation tool, branched automations are run in parallel processes, which means that a new and separate process is executed simultaneously as the initial process continues to execute. This means that automations are quick, but the parallel processing can prove challenging for more complex cases, as Ben and team found."Whilst Jira's parallel processing has a performance advantage," says Ben, "we found that our client solutions needed information handoff between branches and conditional logic splits that weren't the easiest to handle in this parallel processing setup."
When it comes to complex processes, things like execution order, sub-routines, and branches are essential, so Ben and team set out to build out automations that could fully represent and defend these processes, allowing for these meaningful nuances.
With ScriptRunner, you gain full control over the complete code execution process. This allows for advanced scripting to manage complex workflows efficiently, ensuring seamless operation. It enables us to confidently provide automations even for the most advanced business operations.
Ben van den Berg
Founder, Agile Digital Solutions
Ensuring that automations meet the real-life process requirements
Beyond the order of processing, the automations that Ben's team implements are often themselves intricate in nature, fuelled by the complex needs of the organisations that Agile Digital Solutions counts amongst its clients.
Whilst the simplified instruction set in Jira Cloud allows users and administrators to automate away repetitive tasks, Ben's team found themselves craving heftier capabilities when it came to automating entire processes.
"Our BizOps solutions require much more advanced automation functionality," says Ben. "We tried to chain multiple automations to achieve the desired outcomes in Jira automation, but this resulted in very complex automations that were difficult to test."
ScriptRunner provided a new avenue for delivering the automations that Agile Digital Solutions dreamt of for their clients.
"Because ScriptRunner utilises scripting in combination with autocompletions and suggestions for the Jira and Confluence APIs, we get nearly unlimited capabilities to use and customise Atlassian platforms to address our clients' business challenges." Ben reports that they are able to realise these BizOps solutions in a fraction of the time it would typically take to craft such solutions on platforms like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
ScriptRunner allows as many steps and lines of code as required to complete start-to-end functions. It simplifies coding, limits complexity, and makes testing much more straightforward.
Ben van den Berg
Founder, Agile Digital Solutions
The impact
The adoption of ScriptRunner has significantly improved the ability, flexibility and efficiency of the solutions that Agile Digital Solutions offers its clients.
Those clients can now benefit from advanced workflows and processes tailored to their specific operational needs, resulting in faster response times and the improved organisational efficiency of their business.
"ScriptRunner has been an essential tool in helping us achieve our business goals and that of all our clients." says Ben. "You have genuinely enabled us to streamline business processes and increase productivity."
Check out ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud now
More about Agile Digital Solutions
Agile Digital Solutions provides digital solutions and services to businesses of any size and industry. They primarily deliver tailor-made BizOps (Business Operations) solutions that function according to the customer's business processes.
Ben van den Berg founded Agile Digital Solutions in September 2021 after he realised that most SMEs (small-to-medium sized enterprises) struggle to operate and manage their businesses effectively due to the lack of formalised business processes and using disparate or no information systems. Very few SMEs have end-to-end business operational solutions that they can use to streamline and optimise their businesses. SMEs are often overwhelmed by administrative burdens and disorganised operations with limited abilities to have a clear overview of their operations at any given time.
As a seasoned ICT (Information and Communication Technology) professional, Ben realised that SMEs desperately need end-to-end BizOps (Business Operations) solutions to effectively manage and operate their businesses. Having been involved with software engineering for over four decades, he established Agile Digital Solutions with the goal of providing affordable, tailor-made, state-of-the-art business operational solutions to businesses of all sizes and industries, including Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Contracting, Cooling Refrigeration Contracting, and Tertiary Education.
