What are the use cases for having New and Opened status on Jira workflows?

Question

I observed the is quite common for people to add a New status to the default Jira workflows and I am looking to reasons why this is really needed or uneeded.

Personally, I am inclined to minimize the number of statuses, just to make Jira easier to use and less confusing.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

It depends on how people are working.

I think most of us are happy with "Open" meaning "workers in the project need to do something about this", which is a logical start for an issue.

But a lot of teams have some form of acceptance or triage as well, and having a single "Open" status doesn't cut it for most.  That is, they need a state before "open" which means "someone has created this, but we haven't looked at it and accepted that it needs doing".  They'd then move it to "open" to indicate "yes, we should do this".

It can be useful to have this step, especially in projects with a high turnover or more "support" style use - issue comes in and needs to be authorised for work, or accepted as a real problem before a worker looks at it (or closed if it's a standard "forgot password, clicky, done by first line" or "this is not a real problem" type response).  It means the developers can ignore "new" and only pick up "open" things, and it gives you a good breakdown of "how much comes in vs how much we actually do"