JIRA SWIM LANES Mandatory Questions

[vmogali]

Hi JIRA Help Team,

I need assistance with setting up a specific workflow in JIRA. Here is the situation:

When a story is created, it progresses through several statuses, such as OnDeck, DEVReady, QA Ready, UAT Ready, PROD, and DONE. I want to implement a trigger mechanism to meet certain criteria before a story can move to the next status.

Here are the requirements:

1. When a ticket is moved from OnDeck to DEVReady status, there should be a triggering mechanism that prompts questions such as:

   • Does the Business team approve of this architecture?
   • Have the 3-Amigos discussions been completed?

2. These questions should be answered before the ticket can move to the next swim lane.

3. Additionally, no story should be allowed to move directly from OnDeck to DONE status without progressing through the intermediate statuses.

Is there a mechanism in JIRA that can solve this problem? Could you share some screenshots to guide me through the setup?

I appreciate your help!

Best regards,

Vijay

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @vmogali 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The answer to #3 is Yes. Workflows can be modified to limit the transitions from one status to another.

The answer to #1 and #2 depends on whether you are working with a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project. Find that information by going to the Projects menu, selecting the View All Projects options, and find your project in the list. The relevant information is in the Type column.

Specific guidance for how to change the workflow for #3 depends on whether the project is Team Managed or Company Managed.

[vmogali]

Thank you for your reply. Yes we are following the "Company-Managed Software" Type

[Trudy Claspill]

For a Company Managed project the workflow can be modified only by Jira Administrators. Are you a Jira Administrator?

The documentation for managing workflows for Company Managed projects can be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-and-manage-issue-workflows-and-issue-workflow-schemes/

Addressing Question #3:

When workflows are initially created, the default is to allow transitions from any status to any status. This is signified by the use of Global transitions as shown here. The arrows from ALL to each status indicates that an issue can come from any/all statuses and be changed to the destination status.

To restrict issues to following a specific path through the statuses you would need to delete those global transitions and add transitions that go explicitly from one status to another.

Addressing Question #2

Once you have those explicit transitions set up, then you can add Conditions and Validators to the transitions to further restrict when a particular transition can be made. Conditions will prevent the transition from being available if the conditions are not met. Validators will allow the transition to be initiated, but will require validators to succeed before the transition can be completed. In your case you would want to add Validators, specifically the Field Required validator, to confirm that the fields have been filled in.

Addressing Question #1

If you want to prompt the user to answer questions during that transition then you would need to make Custom Fields to record the answers to those questions and add those fields to your issue. You would then need to create a custom Screen and put those fields on the screen. You can then associate that new Screen with the transition, and it will appear as a pop-up when that transition.