Should I alternate To Do, In Progress, and Done status categorizations within a Kanban workflow?

kevin.caldwell

I'm curious to understand what the advantages or disadvantages of alternating Status Categories within a single workflow would be. 

For example, should I alternate between To Do and In Progress to separate upstream and downstream Kanban, before finally reaching a status category of Done?

Would this impact the built in reporting that JIRA does in a non-optimal way?

 

Thanks!

Bill Sheboy

Hi @kevin.caldwell -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

If I understand your question, you are asking about comparing something like this (ignoring the status category values for a minute):

A) To-Do  Developing                Testing                 Releasing  Done
   =====  ==========                =======                 =========  ====


 To-Do  Developing  Dev-Complete  Testing  Test-Complete  Releasing  Done
   =====  ==========  ============  =======  =============  =========  ====

• (A) only shows the workflow steps where work is happening.
• (B) also has "queue steps" where work accumulates until the next person with capacity can pull it to start.

Some teams prefer (A) to make it easier to manage WIP in a tool like Jira.  Others prefer (B) to recognize the need for buffers and to measure the waiting versus working time better.

For either, the status categories do not seem to have much impact for Jira's built-in Kanban reporting.  Addon app reporting might look at the the category, but they are more likely to use the board's column mapping to help the team manage flow.

Kind regards,
Bill