Increment and Decrement

Created by Vincent Mutambuki
Last updated: Sept 05, 2017
3 min read

Hot off the development press! We've added an option to increment or decrement your custom fields. This feature was added under the Numeric section. 

There are multiple use cases for this type of formula. For example, let's say you want to count the number of times an issue has been re-worked before it was completed. Your company can then flag those issues that are problematic to close and dive into them to learn what went wrong and identify ways to reduce the re-work. With Abacus, you can create a simple counter that counts every time a resolved ticket is re-opened or sent back to in-progress because it was not completed to the customer's liking. 


First, we create the custom field that we want to hold our new 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 're-work count' field. We then give our formula a fancy name, select our re-work count custom field, and enter a value to increment by (If you 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).



If you toggle the optional fields, we have 3 additional fields that we can use to further customize how the increment function works. 

  • Start at Value - Allows you to set the starting number for the increment/decrement. This can also be used if you didn't set the default value for the custom field you created. 
  • Upper limit - Sets the stopping point for a positive increment. In our case, we can set the upper limit to 3 since we deem anything more than two times bad. 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 formula. In our case we want the formula to be executed when... 

  • An issue is updated (via WHEN clause)
  • And when the status changes from 'resolved' to 'backlog' (via JQL IF clause)


There we have it ladies and gentlemen. Our fancy incrementing machine.