Help with workflows for new statuses

[Grace Dowling]

Bear with me here, I'm lost. I watched the Atlassian Workflow Webinar the other day and have looked online, as well, but having trouble getting these set up. Wanting to add new statuses for more clear timelines to stakeholders: Waiting on requirements, Pending prioritization, In design phase, Awaiting approval (Under Review could take or leave)

The first image is the order of what I am trying accomplish in terms of have dependencies. The second image is the text view of what I am trying to do.

Finally, the third image is how it looks on the diagram view, after making the text updates above, which maybe is correct, but I don't think so and I don't want to hit publish workflow changes yet.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Grace Dowling 

This article should provide you with guidelines, how-to-create-workflows 

It could be that the workflow editor looks different, that's ok.

Atlassian is busy and developing a new workflow editor, but the images in the article are based on the old editor.

See this artciel on the editors, changing-your-default-workflow-editor 

[Grace Dowling]

How does this look and @Mathew Lederman 

We already have a workflow for Jira Service Management, below, the first for bugs and new features and the second for support. I was thinking of having the one workflow as I have above for all issue types. When looking to switch over the workflow to my new one, before doing anything, I want to make sure it is correct, but also don't want to impact negatively all of our stakeholders, so third image below is the message I am getting and just wanting to know the best course of action so that things are done carefully with minimal impact.

[Mathew Lederman]

That looks great! Only note I would make is that the Pending Prioritization <> In Progress transitions overlap. So if you have any post-functions or validators on one transition but not the other it can be a bit difficult to identify from that view. Simple fix is to offset one transition to the side and keep one in the middle. I typically keep 'happy path' in the middle, and 'un-happy path' off to the side because that's what makes sense in my head..  

As for the message, you'll have to assign an issue type to the workflow for it to be used in the project. When you do apply the workflow to an issue type, you'll get a mapping page where you can map any statuses that are in old workflows and not in the new.

The mapping will change the status of all tickets (open, closed, etc.) so your end users may notice the change if they have open tickets with any of those old statuses.  

Unfortunately there's no great way to test this out aside from a sandbox environment, but as long as you know the name of the old workflow you can always revert back, you'll just have to re-do the mapping exercise in reverse.

[Grace Dowling]

Thanks @Mathew Lederman again bear with me if stupid questions please. My thought process for Pending Prioritization -> In Progress, is in the event the request is no longer actively being worked on and transitions back to pending prioritization. When you say offset one transition to the side, do you mean remove one of the arrows so like In Progress -> Pending Prioritization transition only? I also added a new "Blocked" status, for if pending prioritization transitions to Blocked, or In Progress starts and then moves to Blocked.

I didn't set the original workflows up, but was thinking I would keep the existing workflow for bugs and the new one I've created for support and new features. What does the mapping page entail and your suggestions there? I.e. there is "Open" already for new features in my workflow and the old, so that wouldn't change. Also work in progress, done, reopened are all statuses present in the new workflow I created, as well as present in the old workflow, so assuming the existing tickets with these existing statuses, i.e. "open" shouldn't change, as long as I map them to the corresponding status in my new workflow, i.e. "open" again? Then for a status not in the old but being added to the new, i.e. "Waiting on Requirements," that wouldn't be mapped to any old status, so what would happen there?

When you mention sandbox environment, is there one within Jira software, or one that we'd have to manually setup, do you mean? Thanks for your help!!!

[Mathew Lederman]

I just mean to make sure it's two clean lines. One going Pending Prioritization > In Progress and one going In Progress > Pending Prioritization. It's just moving the lines within the diagram, nothing else should change. This just makes it easier to see what's going on if you can see every distinct transition. I shared a screenshot below.

If you're on the Premium or Enterprise plans you should have a free Sandbox environment where you can copy all of your Production data and play around without impacting anything in Prod. If you're on the Free or Standard plan you unfortunately don't get this feature. In this case, I find creating a test project can be helpful in this scenario. 

[Mathew Lederman]

@Grace Dowling first, I'd suggest separating out the statuses a bit to make it more clear what is transitioning where. Next, it looks like you may have transitions OUT of all of our new statuses, but you don't have a transition IN to the first one after Open. 

The red dotted surrounding lines typically mean there are no transitions going to that status. In other words, there is no way to get to that status. 

[Grace Dowling]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks - I'll separate out, create a transition into each after open, what do you suggest after that? I'll share a screenshot once I've done that. Thanks for the answer and bear with me again lol.

[Mathew Lederman]

Sorry, they don't all need to be connected to the Open status, just one of them does. 

For example, if the standard process is Open > Waiting on Requirements > Done, you don't need a connection between Open and Done, but you need a transition from Open to Waiting on Requirements and one from Waiting on Requirements to Done.