Scripting & Automation: A Category Recap

Introduction

It’s been a while since we last covered Scripting/Automation in the Atlassian ecosystem with our 2019 webinar on “A Detailed Review of Automation & Scripting Apps for Jira, Confluence, & Bitbucket” so we thought that an update would be in order.

Back when we ran the webinar Code Barrel’s Automation for Jira had only recently been acquired by Atlassian and we could only speculate on the wider implications of this. Furthermore, Atlassian hadn’t yet announced that they were ending the support of server licenses and “Accelerating our journey to the cloud“.

Automation for Jira has now been fully rolled into Jira Cloud and the Cloud platform has been exploding ever since this announcement. These two developments have had some major implications on the Scripting/Automation category which we’ll get into below.

On top of this we’ll also provide a MARS analysis of the category, some examples of what you can use scripting for, as well as some things to look out for when using scripting in Jira.

What You Can Use Scripting For

We generally see four major uses for Scripting/Automation:

Workflows

Scripted conditions, validators, and post-functions can all be used to implement and enforce business processes, automate processes, and save time on repetitive tasks.

Event Listeners

Users can automate event listeners that look out for a predetermined event to occur then perform a specific action, again this helps enforce business processes and ensure that time is being saved on repetitive tasks.

Calculated Fields

Calculated fields can be scripted into Jira with Excel-style formulas that perform scripted functions to create a new user-defined custom field. Calculated fields can be great for saving users time performing repetitive calculations, ensuring human error is minimized, and enhancing the reporting functionality of Jira.

Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks can be defined by users that will repeat on a preconfigured basis ensuring best practices are followed and tasks are not forgotten about.

Things to Avoid when Scripting/Automating

Furthermore, while scripting and automating tasks in Jira can be powerful and has the potential to save users countless hours of time, there are also many risks involved. We thought that some insight into a number of issues that we’ve come across over our years of scripting in Jira would be useful:

Performing certain ticket actions (e.g. create, update, delete) directly thus bypassing Jira permissions
Creating and updating ticket links, breaking consistency
Executing certain JQL queries that have a detrimental impact on the system’s performance (e.g. ignoring limits on the number of tickets returned)
Directly setting the value of certain custom fields, breaking consistency, ignoring ticket history, and affecting the Jira index
Executing actions impersonating other users
Bulk creating, updating, and deleting user accounts, as the following example shows:

MARS Scripting Overview

MARS is our Marketplace Analytics Research Service database of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps. Through MARS we are able to provide unique, data-driven, and unbiased insights into the Atlassian Marketplace.

For instance, we can see from Figure 1 that Scripting/Automation is the 3rd largest growing category (we assign our own “Meaningful Categorizations” rather than using vendor self-selected ones) with a rate of growth of a little under 5%.

Figure 1: App Categories by Size with 2021 % Growth

Figure 2 shows that it has been a relatively tough year for Scripting/Automation apps in 2021 so far (for reasons that we will get into).

ScriptRunner for Jira is the market leader and has shown relatively impressive growth this year of 8%. The same can be said for ScriptRunner’s Confluence and Bitbucket variations with 9% and 7% growth respectively.

We can also see a number of Appfire’s 2020 and 2021 acquisitions showing strong market share with JSU, JMWE, Power Scripts, and Create on Transition all featuring among the top scripting apps.

Figure 2: Top Scripting/Automation Apps with 2021 % Growth

In fact, as Figure 3 shows, Appfire now controls 48% of the Scripting/Automation market.

Figure 3: Scripting/Automation Market Share by Vendor

Figure 4 shows us the trend growth rates for the three largest Scripting/Automation apps (ScriptRunner for Jira, JSU, and JMWE) as well as Automation for Jira up until (and a bit past) when Atlassian acquired it in October 2019.

Since we started recording data in MARS in November 2018, Automation for Jira grew at a remarkable rate from around 6,000 instances to over 12,500 by January 2020. This was the last data point we recorded on Automation for Jira because Atlassian began rolling Automation for Jira into all Cloud Jira instances and thus is ceased to operate as a Marketplace add-on in the same way.

Looking back at Figure 1 we can see that Automation for Jira’s rise and subsequent acquisition by Atlassian has likely harmed the visible growth of Scripting/Automation as a Marketplace category compared to others since Automation for Jira, which was driving much of the growth in Scripting/Automation, is now a part of Jira Cloud and thus cannot be recorded in the same way.

However, ScriptRunner in particular, as a more intricate, customizable, and code-heavy tool is competing less with Automation for Jira.

Figure 4: Growth Trends for Largest Scripting/Automation Apps

App Profiles

No-code rule builder that lets customers build if-this-then-that-rules based on events in Jira
Used to automate processes, save time, and keep Jira up to date
Acquired by Atlassian from Code Barrel in 2019
Included in all Jira Cloud plans (differences in usage limits and global/multi-project rules between plans)
On DC: 100 users = $370, 1000 = $3,000, 10,000 = $12,000 (all prices annual)

Extends Jira and Improves UX with Groovy Scripts and JQL
Versions for Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo
Largest Marketplace scripting add-on
On Cloud: 100 users = $2,500, 1000 = $8,500, 10000 = $41,000
On DC: 100 = $444, 1000 = $3,600, 10000 = $14,000

Code-free Jira workflow customization
Acquired by Appfire in 2020
On Cloud: 100 users = $900, 1000 = $3,300, 10000 = $13,500
On DC: 100 = $288, 1000 = $2,185, 10000 = $8,050

No code workflow configuration
Also acquired by Appfire in 2020
On Cloud: 100 users = $1,250, 1000 = $4,775, 10000 = $15,325
On DC: 100 = $331, 1000 = $2,513, 10000 = $9,258

Deep scripting solution for general automation, customization, and integration in Jira
Acquired by Appfire in 2021
On Cloud: 100 users = $1,550, 1000 = $8,300, 10000 = $46,300
On DC: 100 = $300, 1000 = $2,550, 10000 = $9,190

Scripting/Automation on Cloud vs DC

On top of Atlassian’s acquisition of Automation for Jira, the growth of Jira Cloud has perhaps had some detrimental impacts on the market for Scripting/Automation applications.

While on DC (and Server) Scripting/Automation add-ons have use of the Java API and thus unlimited access to all Jira core functions. Scripting/Automation apps on Jira Cloud are based on the REST API with a limited range of features.

The Java API is a library of software components, some of them provided by Java out of the box and some others provided by Atlassian. They run in the Jira server, and therefore have a faster response time, and some scripting add-ons allow the scripts they provide to also use the Java API. Therefore, Scripting/Automation add-ons on DC are more powerful, riskier, less stable, and require more code maintenance.

On the other hand, a REST API (also known as RESTful API) is an application programming interface (API or web API) that conforms to the constraints of REST architectural style allowing for interaction with RESTful web services. This means that since scripts run on a different server, network latency matters. Furthermore, when compared to DC scripts they are limited feature-wise, albeit they’re considered safer, more stable, and can get by with less code maintenance.

We can see the more limited functionality of Scripting/Automation apps on Cloud in ScriptRunner for instance. The number of DC features is limited including workflows, scripted fields, built-in scripts, some listeners, script console, jobs, and fragments. Our technical team estimates that around 70% of features have been removed including behaviors, services, custom listeners, custom endpoints, database/LDAP connections, script editor, mail handler, and code insights. We would encourage customers to explore a wider set of apps for cloud because now there are so many, rather than custom scripting.

We hope that you’ve found our recap on the Scripting/Automation category informative and that you’ll be able to bring some insight from it forwards with you.

If you would like to get in touch with us please contact us at hello@blendedperspectives.com.

Blended Perspectives has been acquired by Contegix.