Is it possible to change the Status to earlier States of a BUG in JIRA?

[Pratima Peyyety]

We are using a separate Work Flow for BUGS in JIRA. I have accidentally changed status of some bugs to Ready for QA when they have not yet been fixed. It does not allow me when I tried changing it back to TO DO. Is there a way to traverse backward for these workflows? Only way I could think of is take the bug to Failed state and restart the whole process. Any help in this regard is appreciated.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Pratima Peyyety,

@Vasiliy Zverev and @PADMA KOTHAKOTA are correct about the workflow. If there is no transition defined to a previous status, you cannot go back.

Often - following good practices - workflows are designed like this on purpose as you essentially want to move work forward. If a mistake is made occasionally, it might be best to just do as you say: follow the path of the workflow to a point where you can start the whole process over again. Make sure to comment on the issue why you did this. Or you could close the bug and create a new one. Also talk to the people in your organisation who designed the workflow and ask for their opinion, so you come to a common practice for this type of situations. Cause hey, mistakes do happen sometimes ;-)

Just on a side note: if you would like to prevent this type of errors, it would require to implement 'undo' transitions for every status change in every workflow. Which is a huge amount of work and fundamentally undermines your processes. 

[Pratima Peyyety]

Thanks @Walter Buggenhout! That is so true! The irony is that I have picked the Work Flow and have not allowed this transition keeping in mind to allow only forward transition. I was experimenting with this and pushed some bugs to forward stages to observe the transition and did not realize until later, the damage I had done.

I have anyways promptly re initiated the flow by bringing it to Failed and notified the stakeholders as well to my utter embarrassment!

One lesson learnt the hard way :D

[Walter Buggenhout]

Those are the best ones :-)

[Vasiliy Zverev]

Dear Pratima, good day!

There is the only way to change issue status - make a transition.

Look to the workflow is the any transition between these statuses.

If you are an jira admin you could add this transition. If not - contact to jira admins.

[Pratima Peyyety]

Thanks! I get it now. Unfortunately, there is no transition between these statuses. So I guess the only way is to take it to a break line and start again from there.

[PADMA KOTHAKOTA]

Hi @Pratima Peyyety,

If you want to go back to the TODO status there should be backward transition from Ready for QA to "TO DO" statuses. With out the transition you cannot move to the previous transition. If you are the Jira admin you can add a transition from Ready for QA to "TO DO" status.

[Pratima Peyyety]

Thanks @PADMA KOTHAKOTA! The existing transitions do not have this move. So I will have to push it to Failed and start again.

[Fazila Ashraf]

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