The big advantage of using JIRA for support, rather than something informal like email, is that the status of the issue is always explicitly tracked. We always know who is next expected to respond, and there is no confusion about when an issue is considered closed.
The problem
JIRA needs to change an issue's status on just about any customer operation:
- If the customer edits an issue (eg. to add an attachment we asked for).
- If the customer comments on the issue, without bothering to click the transition link.
- If the customer sends an email to the system, thereby adding a comment.
Normally, edits and new comments don't trigger a workflow transition.
The solution
To transition issues on comments and edits, we have written the AutoTransitionListener JIRA event listener, which triggers a workflow transition on a particular event. The AutoTransitionListener is part of the JIRA Toolkit plugin, which you will need to download and install.
In particular, we define an "Add comments for Atlassian" workflow transition to any status where the customer could comment. To users it looks like this:
In the workflow, we make this transition trigger a custom Customer updated event:
Now we configure an AutoTransitionListener listener to trigger this action if a user edits or comments an issue. Say we wish to listen for comments being added by customers on issues in the Waiting for Customer status. If this occurs, we want to transition the issue to Atlassian Investigating.
So we first add an AutoTransitionListener:
Then edit it, which brings up this screen:
The details