Is there a way to query issues that are in the last status of the "To Do" status category?

Question

We are looking to generate some stats around the health of our teams' backlog.

Our workflows currently may have a status (different for different teams) in the "To Do" status category that represents a refined state.

We are looking to query those issues that are in the last of the "To Do" status category before they get transitioned to being in a state belonging to an "In Progress" status category.

Chris Buzon · Answer

Hey Rajat.

There isn't a way to check the historical statusCategory in a query, just the statuses themselves, or the current statusCategory.

Since you have workflows per issue type you can do this, though it can be a kind of nasty looking query.  This type of query sometimes causes problems with boards/reports.

You'll need to know exactly which of the ToDo statuses come before the In Progress ones (by checking the workflow) and then chaining together clauses.  I've added the issuetypes here just in case you share status names between workflows, but you don't strictly need it if each status is unique to its workflow.

(issuetype = X AND status = status1) OR (issuetype = Y AND status = status2) OR (issuetype = z AND status in (status3, status4))

Benjamin_tmh9yg · Answer

Thanks for the clarification. JQL query does not have historical searches for Status Category.

Depending on how your workflows are, you probably could use a combination of the status query above to obtain a similar result.

Rajat Sud_vuhvvz · Answer

Thanks for the response. It's not the "status" that I'm after....
We have about 7-8 workflows (one for each issue type). Each of the workflows has several statuses, each belonging to 1 of 3 status categories (To Do, In Progress, Done).

Now, I am looking to query all the issues that are in a "To Do" status category - but only in a status(es) that precedes the transition to a status in the "In Progress" status category.

Hope it wasn't too confusing :)