Unable to change status category for a status from Done to In-Progress

[Amara Welling]

Hi all,

Using next-gen, one of my team members created a workflow as shown in the screenshot below. I want to change the "Dev Done" status from the "Done" status category to "In Progress". I seem to be caught in a catch-22 scenario. When trying to change the status, it is not allowed - error message shown: "you cannot change this status category because your workflow needs at least one done status".

But when I try to change another status to the "Done" category (in this case "Accepted by PO"), I get the message "You can only have one Done status for now." when hovering over the "Done" status category. How can I change the project  settings to allow multiple statuses as Done just so I can update "Dev Done" to "In Progress"? Thanks in advance!

[Stuart Capel - London · Accepted solution]

Hi @Amara Welling 

Bill is right and the current limitation is 1 'Done' status per workflow.

Can I suggest changing the workflow to remove the transitions 'Development Completed' and 'Ready for Testing'. This would free up the 'Dev Done' status to have its name changed to 'accepted by PO' and moved to the end of the workflow.

I think 'Development Completed' and 'Ready for Testing' are the same state? I would just put a transition from 'Dev in progress' straight into 'Ready for QA'. This would solve your problem AND simplify the workflow.

Would there be any cases where an issue has finished development but isn't ready for QA? If so you could put a new 'in progress' status in there to reflect that.

Hope this helps. 

[Amara Welling]

Thanks so much for taking the time to review this workflow, Stuart!

You're right, I will make the changes you've suggested. Yes, there is a case where an issue has finished dev but not ready for QA - so I'll make that update as well. 

Thanks again!

Amara

[Stuart Capel - London]

You're very welcome Amara :)

[Amara Welling]

Ok, here's another question for you guys. I followed your suggestions (thank you) and tried to update my workflow to remove transitions and rename/move status boxes as needed. There were no warnings at the end so I proceeded to Save. I get the unhelpful error: "We couldn't save your changes." without any explanation as to why. Here are my workflows, before and after:

Have you encountered this error? I will add that this workflow affects 5 workflows (for different issue types) and there are issues that have already been created that are moving through the workflow. 

TIA!

Amara

[Chris Stott]

I found the "for now" part of the tooltip to be cryptic and confusing, as it seems to suggest that I would be able to have multiple Done statuses if I changed something else about the project/workflow. If it simply said "You can only have one Done status" it would have been much clearer.

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Amara Welling  -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

It appears that workflow feature to change status category is still in progress, and the comments indicate a possible release in early 2021.  You may watch and vote for the issue here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17497

Best regards,

Bill

[Amara Welling]

Thank you Bill! I'll keep an eye out for this feature. 

Cheers,

Amara

[Stuart Capel - London · Accepted solution]

Hi @Amara Welling 

There are some suggestions in this thread that might help to start in troubleshooting.

@Chris Stott quite often with a hint like that it means that it's a feature that might be introduced in the future. If there's something that needs to be done to make it possible the tooltips and notifications generally guide you the the documentation to help understand more about it. It's all continuous improvement though so flagging it up on here or to Atlassian support is always worthwhile as your feedback might lead to an improvement being put in place.

[Amara Welling]

Thanks @Stuart Capel - London I'll try the suggestion in the thread you are referencing. Also I was told by an admin in my organization that I'm not supposed to rename status boxes the way I did (as described in my post) as that could affect other teams' workflows, as we all use the same statuses. So it looks like what I have to do in my case is create a whole new workflow and start over. Should be fun.