Unable to unresolve issues

Question

We love JIRA, but the Atlassian philosophy regards Resolution doesn't fit our processes.  We use JIRA to track the entire cycle from bug/enhance/new-feature identification all the way through deployment.  We don't close an issue with the bug is resolved (addressed by developers and validated by QA), there are many other activities after the resolution including deployment scheduling and the production deployment itself.

Since many standard reports in JIRA depend on the resolution status, we have for the last several years in the standalone version have simply removed this field from our screens so that it can't be changed and have a workflow event that changes it to simply complete when the issue is confirmed as deployed in production.

In the OnDemand version, a workflow I setup is randomly setting this resolution status.  I say randomly, because I have not identified what the cause is.  Sometimes, it is occurring when creating a new issue and sometimes in other parts of the workflow.  Right now, I don't really care if this a bug in my workflow or in the OnDemand system - BUT what I do care about is that I am unable to change that resolution status to a status that will allow it to show up on some of the standard filters, such as My Issues.  I had to create a new filter and push it out to everyone so that they know what to work on.

I have posted this question in the forums, but did not get any useful responses.  I really need to clear these resolution status to something that does not consider it fixed/resolved/doesn't work for me (ugg)/ etc.

This is impacting project manager reports and confusing developers & QA teams to the point that the they are loosing faith in the tool and I don't blame them.

Please help!

Karyn

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

>In the OnDemand version, a workflow I setup is randomly setting this resolution status. I say randomly, because I have not identified what the cause is. Sometimes, it is occurring when creating a new issue and sometimes in other parts of the workflow.

It's definitely your configuration, unless there's something very wrong with OnDemand (which is unlikely because I've not seen anyone else ask about this sort of thing).  There's only two things that this could be, split into three things to look for:

* As you suggest yourself, workflow post-functions could be setting it, so go over your workflow carefully to check all of these
* Check the transitions in the workflow - what screens do they use?  Make sure "resolution" is not on *any* of them (by the way, try not to call it "resolution status" here - that can confuse us as resolution and status are two separate concepts)
* Look at your listeners - you may have one that has been added and configured to change the resolution based on something on the issue.

Colin Goudie · Answer

I think for us to help you're going to have to give us some information on your workflow? What are the steps, how has it been modified from default etc.??

Who set the workflow up if modified? As they should know why it is setting resolved.

As far as a default JIRA instance goes, the resolution field is set when an item transitions into the 'Resolved' Status. You can also add the resolution field to custom workflow screens. If this is the case, potentially someone is setting the resolution field as they transition other workflows steps (but not to resolved)

Again, without knowing your setup hard to say.

Also, if this is a production instance, maybe you will want to contract an Atlassian Expert to have them solve this for you.