How to change workflow without breaking everything on the project?

[Dzmitry Marushka]

Hi,

I have setup a project in Jira, created a workflow with a bunch of statuses and made it active.

Now I want to use another workflow that doesn't have these statuses.

Issue: Our team has created more than 1000+ Jiras with the statuses that are not available in a new workflow that I'm going to make active for this project.

What will happen with the Jiras that have statuses that are not available in a new workflow? Will they be moved to backlog?

How to change workflow without breaking everything on the project?

[Dave Mathijs · Accepted solution]

Hi @Dzmitry Marushka welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First of all, make a copy of the active workflow and give it another name.

Then, edit your inactive workflow.

Next, add the existing inactive workflow to the workflow scheme associated with your project(s).

Now you need to publish the updated workflow scheme. The wizard will ask you to replace any statuses which no longer exist and map them to an existing status of the new workflow.

After confirmation, all existing issues will be mapped to the new workflow (statuses).

IMPORTANT: Existing filters, boards and dashboards might break when old deleted statuses are used. They need to be updated by their owners.

[Dzmitry Marushka]

Hi @Dave Mathijs , thank you for your answer.

Just to clarify - does it mean that there is no way to automate the process of changing the old deleted statuses to new statuses?

For example:

Old workflow has the following statuses:

• BA In Progress
• DEV In Progress
• QA In Progress

New workflow has 'In Progress' status only.

There is a need to change all the above-mentioned statuses from the old workflow to 'In Progress' status from the new workflow.

Is it possible to change it or not?

Thank you!

[Marta Woźniak-Semeniuk]

You need to make the change in the workflow as described and then the re-assignment of the issues will happen automatically when you switch the workflow - you will be asked how you want to map the old statuses to new statuses