Blocking the Transition of An Issue Using Blockers

Josh Oxendale

Hello,

I was hoping someone would be able to help me with setting up blockers in Jira.

My team use a Kanban Board and at the beginning of every week we move tasks from the Backlog to Selected for Development as most teams do. We've noticed that we tend to work on multiple issues at once, with the highest priority tasks being worked on first, however there are times that the priority tasks are missed.

Whilst I'm not expecting blockers to solve this, I would like to be able to put them in place so that the team can only move the top priority tasks further along the board, with the tasks that are blocked only being able to be transitioned once the top priority tasks have a status/resolution of Done. 

Many thanks,

Josh

Andy Heinzer

The way Jira would expect to block a transition, would be through the use of a workflow condition.  However you will find that in Jira Server, the list of native workflow conditions is rather limited.  

So while I think this could be done through the use of a plugin to Jira, there are a number of different plugins to choose from that might be able to help achieve this kind of functionality.   In a quick search I came across a few different plugins for Jira that might be able to do this:

• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.fca.jira.plugins.workflowToolbox.workflow-toolbox/server/overview
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.onresolve.jira.groovy.groovyrunner/server/overview
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.innovalog.jmwe.jira-misc-workflow-extensions/server/overview - this plugin I believe has a 'Linked issues status' workflow condition that might be most helpful in terms of time to configure something like this.

I believe any of these, if not more, could be use to configure this setup.  But the devil is in the details.   If the issues in Jira have some kind of issue link between them, then you might be able to prevent certain issue linked issues from executing transitions until the other issue in the link is in this specific resolved/closed state.