Customers who use Automation for Jira to automatically assign incoming issues to members of a group, can combine their workflow with Out of Office Assistant.

The goal is to have the automation skip users who are out of office.

Step 1: Create one rule per user in Out of Office

Below is an example of a rule that is used to skip assignments in a round robin, while allowing issues in other projects to be assigned.

Important note: 

For every member of the group used by Automation for Jira, create a rule with the following details:

• Coverer: Unassigned
• Project: Restrict to the project or group of projects where the incoming tickets will be generated (if needed)
• Dates: Pick the current date as start date & remove the end date (optional)
• Deactivate rule: Click this option (optional)

As a result, every user will have a rule dedicated to this workflow that they can enable again manually whenever they go on leave.

Remember your options

• It's not necessary to create one rule per round robin automation. With a broad enough scope (i.e. all projects, or the JSM project on which the agent works), a single out of office rule should be able to unassign the issue, no matter which group membership or source was used for generating the assignment.
• These rules can also be managed by the team lead or by a Jira admin as their team members report absences.
• It's also possible to trigger such rules from external platforms like Outlook, Google Calendar, or even Slack. 

Step 2: Set up the rule in Automation for Jira

This is what the automation looks like once finished:

• First, select the trigger Multiple Issue Events and add the events "Issue Created", and "Issue Assigned"

• Second, add the action Re-fetch issue data. This will ensure that the automation doesn't validate outdated assignee values.

• Third, add a JQL condition with the following requirements:
  • restrict the rule to the requests that should be handled by the group. For example: Project="Best International Service Desk"
  • include the condition "assignee IS empty"

• Lastly, add the action to assign issue and configure it:
  • For the Assign the issue field, select "User in a Group"
  • For the Method to choose assignee field, select "Round-robin"
  • For the group, select whichever group that will own the workstream

Step 3: Test the Results

If everything goes well, you will have a perfectly functional Round-Robin that will simply skip absent users. 

To test the results:

• save the rule in Automation for Jira
• activate the Out of Office rule for the first user in the group in alphabetical order
• create a test issue
• Access the issue again. The issue should be assigned to a non-absent user, and you should see a flow similar to this in the history:

Limitations

We are aware that the suggested solution is a workaround with some limitations:

• If every group member is out of office, then the automation will go into an infinite loop. Note that this is unlikely, particular in larger groups, but may impact your Jira plan if it happens
• Absent agents will receive two email notifications for every issue that is skipped while they are away.