Changing a workflow will modify also the one whom it was copied from

Question

Given the following scenario:

* I had to assign a new workflow for story issue type on a specific project which was part of a workflow-scheme with another 10 projects.
* I created a new workflow-scheme and added a new, modified workflow for story (which is a copy of the old story workflow).
* The changes for the new story workflow were renaming some statuses and changing several transitions.
* I switched my project to the new workflow-scheme.

Now the issues appeared, I observed that the old workflow for story, which is no longer assigned to my project, is modified. I did some testing and every time I modify one of the workflows, the other one gets modified as well, but in a different way.

Anyone has seen this odd behavior before?

Jira version 8.13.6

Daniel Ebers · Answer

Unfortunately, this is just like Alexander stated - a basic design circumstance.
In case you won't be able to tell the name of the previous status name you can probably reconstruct it by looking into Auditing.

Apart from that, like Alexander said, you would need to create new statuses given the old naming is not the desired result (f.e. not the status names you want to have).

pbasarab · Answer

Hi,
Indeed, renaming was a bad idea. I just needed the order to be changed between them, so I played with drag and dropping the transitions, which did the trick. 
Didn't think renaming will trigger such odd behaviors (and I guess it should not???).

Alexander Bondarev_x6gjf3 · Answer

Hi, @pbasarab !

Renaming statuses is bad idea because they are global items.

If you need a different statuses in different workflows - you should use existing ones or create a new statuses.