Ren Takahashi posted a good pre-change checklist here a couple of months ago, and one item on it has been rattling around in my head since: "plan a rollback strategy."
https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Cloud-Admins-discussions/What-I-check-before-changing-a-Jira-workflow/m-p/3258024
The instinct is right, but a rollback plan only works if you know what you're rolling back to — and Jira doesn't keep workflow version history. Once you publish a draft, the previous definition is simply gone. There is no "restore previous version" waiting for you.
The audit log doesn't close that gap either. It records that a workflow draft was published. It does not record what was in the draft. So "what did this workflow look like in February" is not a question you can answer after the fact, only one you can answer in advance by having written it down.
Which leads to the thing I'm curious about, because I suspect everyone solves this differently and badly:
What do you actually capture before you open the workflow editor? An XML export? A screenshot of the transition table? A Confluence page someone updates by hand? Nothing, and you rely on remembering?
And the follow-up that I think matters more: has anyone ever gone back and used it? I've met plenty of admins with a folder of exports and none who could tell me the last time one saved them. If the answer is "never", that's useful to know too — it would mean the real risk isn't losing the definition, it's something else.
One adjacent gotcha while I'm here, since it burned someone I know and isn't on the usual checklists: if a status you're renaming or removing is used as an SLA start, stop or pause condition in JSM, the clock can silently stop starting. Nothing errors. You find out weeks later when everything has been sitting at "on track" forever. Project settings > SLAs, before you publish, for every JSM project that touches the workflow.
Disclosure: I build a Jira app in this space, so "write down what it looked like before" is professionally self-serving of me to say. It's also just true, and an export costs nothing.
