Best practices for creating workflows in Jira
10 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:
- Reduce administrative burden by following workflow best practices
- Troubleshoot common workflow configuration problems
Best practices for configuring workflows
Best practices for configuring resolutions in a workflow
👇 Click the boxes below to learn more about configuring resolutions.
Best practices for transition rules
When configuring transition rules, keep these best practices in mind:
- When adding new transition rules, ensure they‘re in the correct order. You don’t want to copy a field value before you set it.
- Ask yourself if a transition rule is necessary before you add it. Can every space that shares this workflow use the transition rule?
- Avoid relying on third-party apps for transition rules, as these stop working if the app is removed or disabled, or the license expires.
Best practices for properties
When configuring properties, keep these best practices in mind:
- Ask yourself if a property is necessary before you add it. Can every space that shares this workflow use the property?
- Ensure you enter the property key correctly, or Jira can’t understand it. Make sure to remove all spaces.
- Configure as many permissions as possible in permissions schemes. Only use properties for unusual permission use cases.
- Instead of using a property to make work uneditable, only allow Jira admins to edit work items. This way, Jira admins can easily take action on work if needed, but most users can’t.
Best practices for managing workflows
Setting up workflows in Jira is pretty straightforward, but you’ll avoid a lot of maintenance and confusion if you spend time carefully gathering users' requirements.
👇 Click the boxes below to learn best practices for gathering requirements.
Best practices for workflow governance
Following some simple best practices can decrease the administrative burden of any workflow, but especially company-managed space workflows.
👇 Click the boxes below to learn best practices for workflow governance.
Troubleshoot workflows
Workflows are complex and interact with many configurations in Jira. These are some of the most common problems and how to troubleshoot them:
- If a user can't see any transitions, check the Transition Work Items permission.
- If a user can’t see a specific transition, check the transition’s rules.
- If a user can’t edit work in a specific status, check the jira.work.items.editable property.
- If a user can't comment in a specific status, check the jira.permission.comment property.
- If a user can't update a required field during a transition, check that the field is on the transition screen.
- If a board column doesn’t have work, check if the status exists in the workflow. If it doesn’t, you may need to remove that column.
- If a board doesn’t have a specific status, check if the status is in the Unmapped Statuses section of the board configuration.
- If your filters based on status return incorrect results, check if the status exists or has the same name.
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next lesson
Configure internal notifications in team-managed spaces
- Configure internal notifications
- Let’s explore an example!
- Troubleshoot notifications