Automate Tasks in Aha! Develop
August 26, 2021

Automate Tasks in Aha! Develop

by Jeff Tucker

Assigning code reviews. Updating the status of work. Linking features and pull requests. These are just some of the recurring tasks development teams spend precious time on each day. Even automating just some of them would free you up to focus on more significant work. The good news is that now you can automate them in Aha! Develop.

You can now add code-based automations to extensions in Aha! Develop — to reduce manual tasks and improve your workflows.

Extensions in Aha! Develop give you the ability to customize how you work. Powered by modern JavaScript architecture and GraphQL, you can create extensions to add unique workflows, deploy code, and much more. Extensions are open source, free to use, and easy to install and modify.

With this update, you can add event handlers to extensions to automate actions within Aha! Develop — and across other tools as well. Aha! Develop surfaces more than 10 events, such as updating workflow status, adding a tag, and assigning users.

Think of these events as the triggers for your automations. Add a code-based automation to any extension via an event handler to define what action should follow the event. Even better, we host and run the extension code for you. No need to set up your own infrastructure.

Let's take a look at two ways you can use code-based automations:

Automate repetitive tasks

Create an extension to automate routine tasks — such as adding tags to features, assigning to-dos, or updating feature status. In the example below, we added an event handler to an extension. Now when a "Security review" tag is added to a feature, a to-do is automatically created and assigned to the security team. This ensures a smooth handoff between teams.

Define as many fields in the to-do as you want using the event handler.

Keep your development tools in sync

Use Aha! Develop as your source of truth and keep other tools in sync as you make progress on work. In the example below, we added an event handler to the Zendesk extension. When a record status changes in Aha! Develop, the ticket in Zendesk is also updated. This keeps the support team in the loop automatically — so they can proactively inform customers of progress.

Change the feature in Aha! Develop to "Done" and automatically update the Zendesk ticket.

Create customized automations for your team to save time in your daily work and be happy.

We hope automations in Aha! Develop will make it easier for you to focus more time on the work you love. Even if you cannot automate away all of your repetitive tasks, you can feel satisfied knowing that you are making the most of the time you have. What you choose to automate can have a big impact on your productivity.

Sign up for a free trial of Aha! Develop — work the way you want

Aha! Develop is a fully extendable agile development tool that helps you completely customize how you work through extensions. Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 500,000 users trust our cloud-based software to build lovable products.

Jeff Tucker

Jeff Tucker

Jeff is passionate about promoting customer empathy throughout product and engineering teams. He is a senior product manager at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software. Jeff has more than 10 years of experience across product, design, and engineering roles. Previously, he managed products at developer tool and cybersecurity startups.

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