How does the Scheduled Templates app protect us from another failure?

Probably most of you have heard about international meetings called Fuckup Nights. It is a global movement and event series where 3-4 speakers share their stories of business and professional failures in 7 minutes and 10 images. The motto of these meetings is: “We live life without filters by sharing stories of failure”. The story that happened recently in our team fits perfectly into the convention of these meetings. Fortunately, we turn failure into a success that would not be possible without one of our solutions – Scheduled Templates for Jira Cloud.

Automatic task creation from email

Our team uses the Google mailbox (Google Workspace package to be exact) and Jira Service Management to handle customer requests. We want to provide our clients with a convenient option for submitting tickets, which is why we have an email channel configured in the service project. Thanks to this, requests are created automatically after sending an email to the address support@appsvio.com. Everything worked fine, more tickets appeared in the queue. Until one Friday… When our clients uninstall the app, an email comes with feedback: what was the reason for the uninstallation? We received this information via email, but no sign in the service queue! It turned out that in our inbox we have messages with the title “[Atlassian Marketplace] Feedback for Feature Bundle for Jira Service Management“, but none of these emails has created a ticket in the project. What happened? 

Searching for the cause of the error

We started the investigation by checking the logs. We wanted to check that the connection to the e-mail address is active and that messages are processed as expected. To check the logs, you need to go to the project settings as the administrator of the service project. After selecting Channels you must select Email. The View logs option is available next to the selected e-mail address. After going to the Connectivity log tab, we saw the entry:

Something was wrong with our connection for over a month! But we still haven’t gotten to the root of the problem.

Pro tip: When you finish reading this article, we encourage you to check the connection in your project. Detailed documentation about email logs you can find on the Atlassian website at this link.

Advanced password management in Google

Our administrator joined the search, which was organized by the investigation team (= our support team). He logged into the Google account and checked Google security settings. It turned out that the password for this email box was out of date. For security reasons, it has been configured to have to change the password every 365 days. Of course, nobody remembered about it.

Pro tip no 2: Check the mailbox settings in your organization. You can read more about the password policy in this manual from Google.

Schedule tasks that you will remember

Such a seemingly small thing as changing the password meant that we did not receive requests from customers who created them via e-mail. At first, we were upset that we had led to this situation. We used the template available in Confluence to conduct the discussion and create a postmortem report. We concluded that our app will help us protect ourselves from such failures in the future.

The Scheduled Templates for Jira app allows you to create issue templates and plan their creation in Jira cloud. It is an ideal solution for recurring tasks. Exactly like this with the password expiration reminder! We have created two templates: one private for the administrator and one public for all users.

Each newly recruited employee has the creation of a template and its launch included in the onboarding plan. This is a much more convenient solution than entering the date into the calendar because a task is created when we need it.

When an issue with password expiry notification appears on the Jira board, which we look at every day, there is no risk that we will forget to change the password. Thanks to this, we care about the safety of our employees’ boxes. Reminders for the administrator allow us to avoid situations like the one described in this article.

Conclusion

As you can see, our memory is fleeting, especially when we configure something. We don’t remember the dates. Maybe sometimes we do not realize how much impact this has on the functioning of our organization. Thanks to the Scheduled Templates for Jira app, we can schedule recurring issues. Our app creates them automatically when their time comes. This minimizes the risk that they will disappear somewhere in the depths of Jira cloud. This functionality allows us to maintain a healthy backlog of our daily tasks or the product. Public templates allow you to share your templates with others. Just click Duplicate to start using it for your needs.

We create solutions that help us every day. We’ll be happy to organize a short demo for you and talk about your company’s requirements. Don’t hesitate to book a session via calendly 👩🏻‍💻👨‍💻

If you want to read more about our solutions for Jira cloud, look at the articles listed below:

• Merge requests like the chef combine ingredients
• How to collect customer details in service projects

Credits:

Photo by Ian Kim on Unsplash