Jira CleanUp - Cleaning up Statuses

[Cheri Hansen]

Hi,

Question for the group.  We are working on cleaning up our jira instance and have found an issue where multiple statuses have been created for the same reason.  For example, we have many "To Do" or "Open" statuses.  This causes filtering complexities and just general confusion.  We know the workflows (and projects) where each instance of the status exists, but now want to do a cleanup to get down to one status - if possible.  Does anyone have any thoughts/guidance on how to easily clean up statuses?  Guidance and advise are greatly appreciated!

Thanks,- cheri

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It is mostly a manual effort, as each case is different.  Some parts of a cleanup can be automated or made easier with scripts etc, but status is not one I'd worry about too much, the manual effort in doing it is smaller than trying to automate it.  

For status (not screens, fields, issue types etc, they can be different, although I'd still take a similar approach:)

• First, housekeep, so you know you're only dealing with active stuff.  
  • Go to admin -> workflows and delete all the inactive workflows
  • Go to admin -> Status and delete all unused status
• Second, get a list of all the status and work out where you've got duplicates (It sounds like you've already done this, but I put it second because your list might have been lengthened by status that the first step would have killed off).
  • Decide on which you want to keep, and identify the list of workflows using them
• Third, the slog-work
  • Open each workflow, edit it, replace the status you want to drop with the one(s) you want to keep.

If you have a lot of status, or step 2 is resisted by your people not agreeing what they really should be using, I'd do that iteratively - get rid of what you can on the first pass, then repeat the deduplication exercise with more and more simple lists as you go.

[Anne Saunders]

This is a much tidier explanation, but almost exactly the same process we followed.

I'm at the "Why did we ever think we needed THAT?" phase of the slog-work.

[Cheri Hansen]

thank you!   love the term "Slog-work"   it is so accurate.

[Cheri Hansen · Accepted solution]

These are great.  I was headed this direction, but was unsure of automation.  THANK YOU for your time and guidance.  Really appreciate your time!

[Anne Saunders · Accepted solution]

I'm also dealing with this. We've given up on a programmatic approach, and instead defined a few standard workflows that we'll apply for the set of issue types we use. We had weekly meetings for a couple months and defined our standards, wrote up the workflows in Confluence and took feedback, and standardized our issues, screens, and workflows.

Basically, I'm applying our new standardized issue type scheme, screen scheme, and workflow scheme to each project manually and deleting everything that's left when Im done.

We also create all new software and support projects by copying settings from one of the "master" projects that already has the right settings.

[Cheri Hansen]

thank you!