Adding escalation rules

Add escalation rules to evaluate items in the project and perform actions based on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. See Escalation rule examples.

1. Choose Tools > Administration > Automation Rules.

The Configure Automation Rules dialog box opens.

2. Select an Item type.

3. Click the Escalations tab and then click Add.

The Add Escalation Rule dialog box opens.

4. Select Inactivate rule after it runs once to inactivate the rule so it does not run again after the first time it runs.

5. Select Only apply this rule once per item to apply the escalation rule once per item.

You may want to enable this option to prevent performing the same action multiple times if the rule is scheduled to run frequently. For example, if you configure a rule to check for issues that pass the New Feature Requests filter every 2 hours and assign them to the development manager, you can select this option to only assign each issue that passes the filter once.

6. On the Preconditions tab, select a filter from the Passes filter list to only apply the rule to specific items.

You may want to select a filter if the project contains a large number of items. Click Create Filter to create a filter. See Adding filters.

Escalation rules do not run if the selected filter contains includes <Current User> restrictions. Helix ALM performs escalations as the System user, which is the current user when escalations run.

7. Click the Schedule tab to specify when the rules are evaluated.

8. Select the frequency to Evaluate the rule.

  • Daily evaluates the rule every day at a specified time or number of hours. To evaluate the rule at a specific time, select Start time and enter the time. To evaluate the rule hourly, select the hours option and the number of hours between each evaluation.
  • Weekly evaluates the rule at a specified time on the selected days each week. Enter the Start time and select the days.
  • Monthly evaluates the rule at a specified time during the selected months. Enter the Start time to evaluate the rule and select the months. To evaluate the rule on a specific day of the month, select On this day and enter the day number. To evaluate the rule on a specific day based on a pattern (first, second, third, fourth, or last day of the month), select a pattern option and then select the pattern and day.
  • Manually only evaluates the rule when you select the Run Now check box on the Escalations tab in the Configure Automation Rules dialog box. See Manually running escalation rules.
You cannot change the order that multiple escalation rules run. If an action has multiple rules that are evaluated based on the result of another rule, you may want to change the time each rule is evaluated. For example, evaluate one rule at 10:00 and the next rule at 10:01.

9. Click the Actions tab to select the actions to perform when the rule passes. You can add the following actions: enter event, modify, send email, run executable, add to folder, remove from folder, recalculate fields, and create snapshot (requirement document rules only). See Adding automation rule actions.

You can only configure one action of each type per rule. For example, you cannot add two send email actions to one rule.

10. Click OK to add the rule.