How can I block issues in any column?

Question

I want to be able to block any User History or Task at any time of the flow, wich means that I should be able to block them in any column of the board.

I tried with the workflow, creating transitions from each status to blocked and back again, but it only allows me to see the issues blocked if I create a specific column for blocked, wich I dont want.

Could you help me please?

Thanks

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Silvia Cubero -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding to the answer from Matthias:

I find when teams add a "blocked" status/column to their board, they are saying "blocked is a normal part of us working", and so are less likely to reduce blocking issues in the future...they just accept it.

On the board, you could consider using the Flag indicator (with a right-click) to make blocked items more visible, and to add comments about why issues are blocked.  When the blocking issue clears, right-click again to remove the flag.

Kind regards,
Bill

Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Answer

Hi Silvia,

I think, I'd recommend a bit different design of your project. You could have a workflow without the blocked states like this:

Backlog, Selected for Development, In progress, Waiting for Approval, Done, Cancelled.

If something now gets blocked you could introduce another custom field for it, e.g. a single select field called "Blocked" with the options "by us" or "by the customer - and it can also be empty when it's not blocked.

If you model it this way, you immediately know in which state something is blocked and don't need to move between "in progress" to "blocked" and back to "in progress".

In order to visualize it on a board, you could use swimlanes (based on a query if the blocked field is empty or not), so that you can see your non-blocked issues in one lane and all the others in another one.

What do you think about such an approach?

Cheers,
Matthias.

Silvia Cubero_ofi2hr · Answer

Hi Matthias, many thanks for your quick answer.

Here the context:

I have a proyect where we work with Epics, Stories and Tasks, and Subtasks in scrum, For our daily work, we need to be able to Block either Stories and Task no matter what status are they in. As we work with a scrum board, we want to be able to visualize all the issues in the board with the issue status.

The workflow we are working with has several statuss, Backlog, Selected for Development, In progress, Waiting for Approval, Done, Cancelled and Blocked & Blocked by customer. All the statuses are conected by them as the way the workflow should work, example: a story can go from in progress to blocked, come back to in progress and follow to waiting for approval.

The problem when I tried to assing statuss to each of our boards columns, I'm only able to assing a status per column, which means Blocked will only be shown in one column even if there are issues blocked in other columns (with other status).

if you need more info please just ask me.

Many thansk for your help!!

Silvia