Why does Jira make a column status 'In Progress' when there is a 'To Do' status in it?

Question

Hi all,

I'm wondering what actual affect this is having on any data that comes out of Jira...

As the screen shot shows we have a few statuses that tickets go through before being "In Progress".... Why is the column status set to 'In Progress'?   Can this be changed?

We are having some interesting results in Actionable Agile and hoping that this is not a cause of it...

Tasneem Abdelhameed · Answer

i am also having the same  problem , iam using  scrum board , and i added two status before inprogress, and separated them every one in a column, and he defined that 2nd column is inprogress, however i  should count it as Todo,
is there any solution rather than changing the  workflow,

John Funk · Answer

Hi Christopher,

Is this a Jira Software or Jira Work Management project? Team-managed or Company-managed?

Can you share the workflow that is associated with the project where it shows the To Do status in the workflow? And has the workflow been published if changed recently?

Can you share the full screen so that it shows if there are any unmapped statuses?

Stephen.Lugton · Answer

@Christopher Atkinson The left hand column is always grey for 'To Do', the right hand column is always green for 'Done' and any columns in between are always blue for 'In Progress', there doesn't seem to be any way to change this.

You could use a Backlog as well as a Kanban board so that all the backlog items are off the board, in which case the Next column would be the 'To Do' column

In addition you could have multiple statuses in one column so your Next and Selected for Development could both be in the first column, or you could have 'Next' be in the Kanban backlog