Status and Use of Sub-Statuses

Question

Business Problem:

Today our Jira instance has about one hundred statuses and our teams often are confused about the status of an issue when work is performed across many teams.

Business Ask:

Business Operations want to move to a set of about 5 or 7 statuses and leverage Sub-Statuses to identify different stages of the overall status.  For example work Status is "In Progress" but the stage is Requirements Gathering or Requirements Validation or in Development. From In Progress the status would move to "In Review" with stages of in QA, in UAT, In Peer Review, etc. Other statuses to follow until the item is released or closed.

User interaction:

Is there a way that when an end user updates the status to InProgress a popup window can be displayed that will request the user to select a sub-status or stage. the sub-status or stage listed in the pop-up window are only those sub-status/stages available for the Status that is selected. When the user selects the Sub-status/stage the window closes and the "Sub-status" data field on the issue is updated with that value.

Is this possible?

Can the status and the sub-status be used in reporting both native to jira and via Plugins?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Kimberly Coates

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Jira does not natively have the concept of "sub-statuses". You would have to create a custom field to hold that information and additional customizations to conditionally present that to users to fill in.

Natively Jira sets each Status value you create into a Status Category. The Status Categories are To Do, In Progress, and Done. Each category has a color (gray, blue, and green, respectively) and that is the color that is shown for the Status lozenge. This Status is in the blue/In Progress Status Category.

Status Category is not a value you set for an issue. It is inferred from the Status currently set on the issue. And it is not possible to add more Status Categories to the Jira application. There is a change request to allow that:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-63384

I'm not aware of any plugins that would enable a "sub-status" value as you described, but I don't know every available plugin.

So, there is no pre-built solution for what you want. It might be possible for you to create a custom solution, between native functionality and third party plugins, but I think it would take a significant amount of work.

You might be better served by investigating options to simplify your available Statuses across the teams and get them to agree on a smaller, meaningful set of values.

If you wanted to allow the teams to have another selection list type of field to provide more context to the Status value, you could consider creating a custom Single Select List field, and setting up Contexts for that field that are project specific. That would not natively enable you to associate portions of that those selection lists with specific Statuses, but it is a partial solution.

If you wanted to enable the Project Administrators the ability to maintain those lists customized for their specific projects, you could consider the plugins Manage Custom Fields and Project Specific Select Field. There may be other apps that provide the same functionality.

caglad · Answer

Assuming you dont want it to go from In progress and substatus 1 to substatus 2 to subtatus 3 before you go to the next Status,  you can do a "validator" in your work flow and set up a required field "what stage" and ensure the user fills it out.  Thats one way to see the substatus