Alerts: an email when a work item sits too long

The panel tells whoever opens a work item how long it has been sitting. An alert tells the person who should have opened it. A project administrator sets a limit for a status; when a work item has been in that status for longer, Statuswatch has Jira send its assignee an email.

Setting one up#

Under Project settings → Apps → Statuswatch, in the section "Alerts", choose "Add an alert". Pick the "Status" from the project's own statuses and give "Alert after (hours)"; half hours work (7.5). Save. A project can have up to 20 alerts, one per status.

The hours are counted the way the panel counts them: in the project's working hours, in the calendar that applies to that work item, skipping nights, weekends, breaks and holidays. Forty hours is a working week, not two days. In a project that counts calendar time the limit is calendar hours, and the email says so.

What is sent, and to whom#

An email from Jira's own notification service, the same one that tells you about comments, to the work item's assignee:

"SWCM-22 has been in In Review for 5d 1h", and below it, how long that is in working time, the limit set for the status, and why you are receiving it.

• Once for each stay. The check runs every hour; the email is sent the first time a stay is found past its limit, and not again. A work item that leaves the status and comes back begins a new stay and can alert again.
• Measured on the current stay, not on all visits together: three earlier days in Review do not count against today's.
• Nothing about the past. Work items already past a limit when you save it are not mailed. Otherwise a new alert on an old project would send hundreds of emails in its first hour. Alerts start with what crosses the limit from then on; changing a limit counts as a new alert in this respect.
• Nobody is mailed about a work item without an assignee. To find those, use a filter on Time in current status.
• At most 50 emails per project and hour; anything beyond that follows in the next hour.

When no email comes#

• The working hours could not be read. Then the stay is only known in calendar time, and an email about "40 working hours" would be a claim about a number that is not one. Statuswatch stays silent for that run and catches up in the next.
• The assignee has switched Jira's email notifications off, or Jira's outgoing mail is disabled on the site. The email is Jira's; Jira's settings decide whether it is delivered.
• The work item is done. The clock stops at done, and so do alerts.

Permissions and data#

Sending the email needs one more permission than the rest of the app, send:notification:jira. It was chosen because it can do exactly this: ask Jira to notify people about a work item. It cannot change a work item. The check runs every hour with nobody signed in, so like the report fields it reads the project's open work items as the app. It does not read who the assignee is: it asks Jira to notify "the assignee" and Jira fills in the person. What it remembers is, per project, which work items have been mailed for which stay: issue ids and timestamps, no names.

The email goes through Jira's notification service and nowhere else. Statuswatch still sends nothing outside Atlassian.