Hot off the development press! We added an option to increment or decrement your custom fields. This feature was added under Numeric calculations.
Use cases for this formula type are plenty. For example, let say you want to count the number of time an issue has been re-worked before they are completed. You company wants to flag those issues that are problematic to close so that they can learn what went wrong and indemnify betters ways to fix similar issues. With Abacus, you can create a simple counter that counts every time a resolved ticket is re-opened or send back to in-progress because it was not completed to the customers liking.
First, we have to make sure we have created the field that we want to hold our increment value. Make sure you set a default value for the field when creating your custom field. Abacus does not calculate empty fields. In our case, we created a field re-work count. We then gave our formulas a fancy name, selected our re-work count custom field and entered the value to increment by (Remember that if enter a number without a sign, Abacus assumes it is positive. If you want a negative number, you have to enter a negative sign before the number).
We we toggle the optional fields, we have three additional fields that we can use to further customize how the increment function will work.
- Start at Value - allows us to set the starting number for increment or decrement. This can also be used if your did not set the default value for the field when you created the field.
- Upper limit - This is used to set the stopping point for the increment function. In our case, we can set upper limit for re-work at 3. Since we deem an issue reworked more than two times will be flagged by our filters. Therefore there is no need counting after that.
- Lower limit - this is used when decrementing a number and you want to set a stopping point.
Finally, we create an execution plan to run our formulas. In our case we want the formula to be executed
- WHEN issue is updated.
- and IF status changed FROM resolved to backlog
There we have it ladies and gentlemen. Our fancy incrementing machine.