Jira Automation Practices: Insights from Sunrise Integration’s Project Manager John Rabal

Atlassian’s #JiraHeroes series features monthly interviews with customers, and this month’s focus is John Rabal, a senior project manager at Sunrise Integration, who discusses how his team uses Jira automation to simplify daily reminders, reporting, and cross‑team collaboration.

John introduces himself, his role, and Sunrise Integration’s work delivering custom software, data integration, and workflow solutions for clients such as Ferrari, DHL, and Mastercard.

Motivated by the need to provide the right tools for continuous delivery, his team built a comprehensive Jira/Agile ecosystem that scales across projects, teams, and customers, using features like Insights to track velocity and weekly demos to deliver valuable software.

He describes specific automation processes, including the use of burn‑down charts for sprint planning, and emphasizes the importance of keeping the backlog tidy and organized.

The interview details several automation rules: (1) a daily incomplete‑issue reminder that gathers each developer’s unfinished tickets in the current sprint and sends a Slack message with issue key, summary, story points, and status; (2) an end‑of‑day issue‑status report that compiles sprint tasks and emails stakeholders; and additional rules that sync portal comments to other projects and alert project managers when tasks risk exceeding estimates.

John shares best practices such as maintaining a clean backlog, breaking work into sprints, using epics with clear descriptions, assignees, story points, original estimates, and linking related sub‑tasks, as well as documenting all automation rules for knowledge transfer.

He advises new Jira administrators to create sandbox projects, practice scenarios, and learn from mistakes, noting that automation should be applied judiciously—just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should.