This is a guest blog from our partner – Tempo.
Automation in Tempo is easy with the help of a tool like ScriptRunner! The team recently joined forces with Adaptavist and released 5 productivity scripts to automate parts of the process within the Tempo Suite. Today we’ll go over some use cases and scenarios for some Tempo ScriptRunner scripts. That being said, you can learn to automate some parts of Tempo and Tempo Timesheets in the automation webinar happening on December 5th with our partner Adaptavist.
Never heard of ScriptRunner or Tempo? Time to elevate your game!
ScriptRunner, one of the top apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, enables you to extend, automate, and customize your Atlassian stack via your own scripts or through some premade ones.
Tempo, another top app on the Atlassian Marketplace, provides efficiency and visibility-enhancing apps such as Tempo Timesheets, Tempo Planner and Tempo Budgets to help IT, software development, consultancy, and business teams work smarter.
Why should you care?
Automating parts of Tempo enables added customization and simplification of the tool without creating recurring steps for your team. In other words, the user or team lead looking to perform specific actions from Tempo will not have to manually perform those actions anymore. By leveraging the pre-written scripts offered in the Tempo ScriptRunner Library, those actions will be automatically done!
Today’s example: Get Tempo Plans Using the REST API for a Set Time Period
This script uses Tempo Planner, a tool to streamline the management of teams and resources to quickly find available team members and maximize your resource utilization. As the name of the script suggests, ScriptRunner now has a way to remove some pesky manual labor and automate the process of pulling Tempo plans of interest for a given Jira Issue.
Where does this script shine?
Let’s take the case of Taylor, a team lead for Rougetech. Every month, Taylor and her team get together for their monthly planning. In it, they plan time for each team member on the tasks that they must do.
In other words, her current steps to see the total plans for the next 4 weeks are as follows:
- In Jira, navigate to Tempo Planner and plan the task for the team
In your Tempo Planner page, you will have the possibility of filtering the view to your team. The capacity of the team and the individual members will be displayed for the determined period.
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After the planning has been completed, Taylor will be able to revisit an issue to see who all the collaborators are, and quickly calculate the total time planned to see if it matches her initial prediction and budget.
The issue “Have Fun!” showcases all the planned time under “Collaborators”
That being said, this is slightly annoying for Taylor because of the following:
- She has to manually sum the time to find out how much time has been planned on the issue
- It does not say when that time is being planned for as the issue shows the total planned time only
On the surface, this might not seem like much and it could end up simply saving 5-20 minutes per issue. But, let’s not forget the following:
- Taylor has to look at more than one issue every month, making her waste even more time
- Taylor has to do the same steps over and over again when they can be automated
- Taylor has no idea if all the planned time is evenly broken up or if it’s all planned during a certain week
This repetition of a mundane task could also be a widespread practice throughout the whole organization. Other team leads could be following the same practice (especially if it is standardized), meaning that the company is losing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on such a little thing.
In other words, the script does the following:
- Reduces the amount of manual labor necessary to attain the end result
- Gets the total time for the relevant period immediately when visiting an issue
- Decreases the potential human error to near zero
- Automatically displays the planned time of a determined time period for an issue as a Jira custom field. This allows for reporting on planned time in the Jira issue view and to include the planned time information in other Jira reports
- Compare total estimated time with remaining planned time. Enables you to quickly query on those issues that are over- or underallocated
But the use case does not limit itself to monthly planning!
There are many other scenarios where this script can save precious time for the end user and the organization.
For example, a manager in a consulting firm could be looking at the staff’s planned hours for a client’s issue to ensure that for a given time period, the time planned does not exceed the contractual agreement with the client. If it does, then the firm can let the client know that they will charge extra.
Or if for example people were logging time on an off-site issue (such as meeting clients or being on the road), then it would help a manager quickly understand how much time his team is spending off-premise, and help determine the remaining capacity of his team for a predetermined time frame.
How do I get my hands on the script?
The beauty in this partnership is its simplicity. In short:
- Get ScriptRunner via the Atlassian Marketplace or the “Add-ons” page in Jira’ settings
- Head to the Tempo – Adaptavist Library found here and subscribe to the library
- Go to the script of interest and copy the script in your ScriptRunner
All you have to do is to copy-paste the script in your ScriptRunner terminal and tweak the variables to your use case.
Are there other scripts like this?
Today, we quickly went over one of the newly published scripts made by the Tempo-Adaptavist partnership for Tempo Planner and some scenarios in which time could be saved through automation.
More scripts have been recently published in the Tempo-Adaptavist library. One way to learn more about those scripts would be to join the automation webinar “Save time with tempo and ScriptRunner automations” on December 5th. You can register for the event here to get a recording.
