Is "Pending QA" a 'To Do' or 'In Progress' category

[Fran Damby]

Hi 

I'm having some discussions with my project leads at the moment regarding the current configuration of our workflows. 
It's a sizeable company with a countless number of Jira projects. 

They all have the Status Category of 'To Do' on 'Pending QA' tasks but there is an argument that the story status is actually 'In Progress' because Pending QA is part of the Definition of Done workflow and not the Definition of Ready and our Release board shows more blue 'To Do' issues than it should and its misleading when release planning. 

Whats your thoughts on this?

[Pete Singleton]

It's really a question of preference... I would say that anything that has been started is "In Progress", whether it is in a holding state or actually being worked on.  I am currently in an organisation where they have lots of the "To Do" statuses, which as you have pointed out can make a mess of the release progress charts.  So my personally view is that you should only have one "To Do" state, only one "Done" state (using the resolution field to differentiate closure reasons), and everything else is "In Progress".