What will happen to the JIRA tickets if you change the Workflow?

[Robert Joyce]

What will happen to the tickets in JIRA if you change the workflow.

For example....Currently completed tickets are marked as DONE.

We want to redefine DONE and add some states after:

DONE -- Ready For Production -- Deployed To Production -- User Acceptance -- Completed.

If we do this will all of the tickets that we have set to DONE show backup in the Backlog because they have not been process to Complete?

[Trudy Claspill]

@Robert Joyce 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Is your board a Scrum or Kanban board?

How do you plan to change the column/status mappings for your board? Will the Done status remain in the right-most column, or will the new statuses become new columns to the right of the current Done column?

[Robert Joyce]

Scrum Board

The new statuses will become new columns to the right of Done.

Also we are thinking of removing Done entirely. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Is your project a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project?

[Robert Joyce]

Team. Changes will be contained to my teams project. 

[Trudy Claspill]

I would have to do some experimenting to determine the answer. What I've found so far is:

- For a Company Managed project, if you keep the Done status and add additional statuses in columns to the right, the issues set to Done do not reappear in the backlog and are still considered "completed" in the previous sprints where they were set to Done.

Before I do any more experimenting, I'll await your answer to my last question.

[Robert Joyce]

Your question about team or company?

Team.

[Trudy Claspill]

For a Team Managed project, the answer depends on what Status Category your new statuses will be in.

DONE -- Ready For Production -- Deployed To Production -- User Acceptance -- Completed.

If any of the statuses to the right of the original DONE status will be part of the In Progress Status Category (blue), you can't put them to the right of Done while the original Done status remains part of the Done Status Category (green). See how the "Save Changes" button is not enabled while the blue "Ready for deployment" status is to the right of the green "Done" status?

You either have to move the blue statuses to the left of all green statuses, or you have to delete the green Done status while you are updating the workflow.

If you delete the green Done status while updating the workflow you will be forced to select a new Status value for issues that were in that green Done status.

Regardless of how you map them (to new green statuses or to new blue statuses) the issue will not reappear in the backlog. I think this is because they will retain the setting of the Resolution field, which tells Jira they are "done".

But the status shown for the issues when you look at them individually or in the Sprint reports will have been updated based on your mappings.

If you map the previous green/Done status to new green/"done" statuses, this is not a problem.

If there is a case where you mapped a status previously set to green/Done to a  new blue/In Progress status, this could be a bit confusing.

This is from a Sprint Report where TTS-3 was originally set to Done, but in the workflow change process I mapped the Done status for a Task to the new blue Ready for Deployment status.

And this is what I see when I view the issue directly.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Hi @Robert Joyce  and welcome

If the same statuses exist in the new workflow, then tickets will stay in those statuses. Else, Jira will ask you to map the old statuses to the new ones.

Don't forget to publish the workflow scheme changes.

HTH,
KGM

[Robert Joyce]

Thanks for responding. Do you know if the tickets will return to the backlog?