Status transition history for multiple Jira issues

[#1]

“To Do” → “In Progress,” “In Progress” → “In Review,” “In progress” → “Done,”  “In Review” → “To Do” – you may have different statuses in your Jira workflow, but analyzing transitions from one to another will provide deep insights into issue lifecycle and process efficiency. For instance, by analyzing the most common transitions, you can identify if there are any status changes that frequently lead to issues being reopened or stalled. 

In Jira, you can easily find status transition changes in the History section when opening each task. You can also check 6 simple options to track status changes in Jira. 

Here, we’ll focus on status transitions for multiple issues and what reports you can get.

🔹 What insights can you gain from status transition changes?

Monitoring the history of status transitions for Jira issues can give you important information about the effectiveness, performance, and bottlenecks in your process for developing and resolving issues.

Here are some specific insights you can gain from analyzing the status transition history:

• Example 1: On average, it takes 5 days for an issue to move from "To Do" to "In Progress", indicating a bottleneck in the initial stages of the workflow.
• Example 2: 30% of the issues are moved back to "To Do" or "In Progress" after reaching "Testing", highlighting issues with the quality of the code or the testing process.

🔹 How to search for specific status transitions?

If you want to see the list of issues that went through specific transitions, the best option is to use Jira Query Language (JQL) or AI intelligence. 

JQL 

1. Show issues where the status changed from "To Do" to "In Progress" during the specified date range.

status changed FROM "To Do" TO "In Progress" during ("2022-01-01", "2022-12-31")

2. Show issues where the status changed from "In Progress" to “Done” for a specific assignee:

status changed FROM "In Progress" TO "Done" AND assignee WAS Jack

3. Show reopened issues for a current user within the last day.

status changed FROM "Done" TO "To Do" BY currentUser() AFTER -1d

Jira AI

With AI intelligence, it has become easier to query information. If you don’t know JQL, you can enter what you are looking for and AI will help to create JQL for you. For example, you are searching for issues where the status changed from "To Do" to "In Progress" for a specific project. Here is how you can write your request:

Built-in options can answer some questions like: What issues are frequently reopened? What issues are stuck in some statuses? However, they don’t reflect the complete picture of status changes. So, let’s move forward.

🔹 How to see all status transitions for all issues?

When you’re looking for a way to overview the complete status transition history for your project, some assignee, or other filters, try Issue History for Jira. It can answer any question from the table at the beginning of the article and offers different views such as in app, on issue panel, gadget on Jira dashboard.

▪️ What is the flow of statuses for issues in my project?

You can create a report that shows all the transitions each issue went through for the required project. It’s easy to do with the available settings. Choose the project and add the status field to the columns. 

We’ve sorted the report based on the order of the issue keys.

▪️ What issues were reopened?

Here, you can choose any specific transition you are interested in. For our case, we go with “Done” → “To Do” to see reopened tasks.

▪️ Who moved the most issues from In Progress to Done?

You can select specific transitions to see who completed the most issues last week, during the sprint, or another period. For example, “In progress” → “Done.”

Export the report to a CSV or Excel file for calculation and further analysis.

Here, we used the Pivot table option to see counts of transitions made by each person. 

  

If you need detailed instructions on how to create the report and the pivot table, please schedule a demo. Our expert will guide you through every step.

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▪️ What is the frequency of moving from a specific status to another?

For this case, we want to see all transitions and count the most frequent ones to find out how productive the team is. For example, if the most frequent is “In progress” → “Done,” then we can infer that the team effectively completes tasks and progresses well through their workflow. On the other hand, if the most common transition is “In progress” → “On hold,” it may indicate potential bottlenecks or issues that must be addressed to improve team productivity and workflow efficiency.

Here, we need to select all transitions, export the report to the Excel file, and use the Pivot table again. 

In our example, we can see that the most frequently used transition is “Done → To Do”, which means that the team is revisiting and reopening completed tasks. This could indicate a lack of clarity in task definitions, not achieving desired results, or shifting priorities, leading to rework and potentially affecting overall productivity.

By analyzing these transition frequencies, we can gain valuable insights into the team's performance and identify areas for improvement.

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Takeaway

Teams can improve their workflows and produce better results by utilizing the insights obtained by status transition analysis. JQL allows you to search for issues based on specific status transitions, such as moving from "To Do" to "In Progress" or identifying reopened issues. Issue History for Jira app provides comprehensive reports that overview the entire history of status transitions for assignees, projects, and other criteria. These reports allow teams to visualize the flow of statuses for issues, identify reopened tasks, and track the completion of issues by specific transitions.

Try to create custom history reports with Issue History for Jira (30-day free trial)

[Omar Chin-Keow]

I have been applying this method for a few years now. I love how this tool makes the meta data available to truly understand how work has been progressed through the various department pipelines.

Especially useful when reducing waste in the system and you need to trace the history of outliers shown on the control chart.

Thanks Issue history team,

O.

[Yuliia_Borivets__SaaSJet_]

Hi @Omar Chin-Keow 

Thank you so much for your feedback about your experience working with Issue History for Jira! As a product marketer of the app, I really appreciate it and am happy to hear that it's useful for your company. I'm going to pass it on to the team and I am sure it will make their day! 🥰

If you have a free minute, you can also help us grow by leaving your feedback on the app's review page so that other customers can read it, too.