New Feature: Different Workflows per Issue Type for Team Managed Projects

[#1]

Hello Jira fans,

Have you dreamed of creating a different process for managing your bugs? Now, you can!

Over the past year, we’ve enabled you to:
1. Visualize and map your team’s process to Jira via our brand new, workflow editor.
2. Accurately define each stage of work with the release of additional Done statuses.

We’ve listened to your feedback, and we understand that different types of work go through different processes. Today, we’re proud to announce: team-managed project admins now have the ability to set a different workflow for each of their issue types.

How to get started

As you’re following along with the example, consider: how does your team treat different types of work?

Let’s say our team handles five different types of work: epics, stories, tasks, and bugs – we call these issue types in Jira. Currently, our team has defined four statuses to represent the state of an issue at a specific point in our team’s process: To Do, In Progress, In Review, and Done. Each of these statuses are represented as columns on our board. However, we want to ensure all bugs are triaged by one of our teammates so we’d like to add statuses to accurately represent the bug triaging process. For example bugs on our team may transition through the following statuses: Open, Triage, In Progress, In Review, Fixed.

Let’s walk through how to define a different workflow for bugs in Jira and map the newly created workflow onto your board:

1. Navigate to the workflow editor via the meatball menu in the upper right.

2. Add your desired statuses. In this example, I created the following statuses: “Open”, “Triage”, and “Fixed”. (Note: I deleted the “To Do” and “Done” statuses because these two statuses don’t apply to my bug workflow).

3. Click on “Update Workflow” in the top right corner and select “Bug” from the dropdown menu.

4. Click “Next” to apply your changes to the Bug workflow.

5. We have now created a workflow that only applies to the bug issue type. In team-managed projects, creating a new status means creating a new column on your board. Navigate to board settings to correctly map the newly created statuses to the appropriate columns.

6. Drag and drop your newly created statuses to the appropriate columns. Rank the statuses that come first in your team’s workflow at the top. Delete unnecessary columns to reduce clutter; we recommend you keep it to a maximum of five columns so you and your team can view your all of board’s columns on one screen.

7. Once you save your changes, notice that drop zones on the board will help inform your teammates of the available transitions and statuses per each issue.

Bonus:

We understand that team’s processes may change over time. Admins can now manage the individual workflows per each issue type directly from the board settings page in Project Settings. Quickly navigate back to the workflow editor via “Manage workflow” > “Edit Workflow” to add additional statuses as your team iterates on your process.

Pro Tips

1. Start simple and set a different workflow for one of your issue types, then iterate with your team going forward.

2. If your team has a lot of columns on the board and constantly find yourselves scrolling horizontally, try grouping some of your In Progress columns to simplify your board

3. If your team has multiple terminal statuses (e.g., Done, Won’t Fix, Fixed, etc.), we suggest you map your terminal statuses to the rightmost column of your board. A board is a representation of a team’s work; we assume that work moves from left to right as your team completes work during a sprint.

4. Set rules to help automate and make your team's process more efficient.

What’s next:

In the next couple of months, our team is working hard to deliver the following workflow features:

1. Hide unnecessary statuses from your board to keep your team focused on active work

2. A more seamless way of mapping your newly created workflows to your board

Feel free to voice your feedback for these features (or your feedback for team-managed projects, in general) in the comments section below.

Best regards,
Bryan
Product Manager, Jira Software

[Bearcat M_ Şándor]

 As the sole member of my company, I tend to use Company Managed projects. Will this functionality land there as well at some point?

[Maite Rodriguez]

Hi, 

A request that we've already transfered to you is that we can several workflows in projects in Jira Work Management. Do you have it foreseen in you short-term roadpmaps? Thanks in advance

[Wim Matthijs]

Awesome, i'm already using this but it leads to a lot of different statusses being mapped on the SCUM/KANBAN boards, there should be swimlanes or sub-boards to better clarify the statusses and the flows imho.
Other than that pretty happy with this

[Josh Allen]

This is awesome! Thank you!

One other thing that would be great is the ability to have a separate status for issues in the backlog rather than the issue taking the default status of the very first column on the board. This will help with viewing issues on a list in confluence. How do I know which ones are "to do" and in the backlog vs "to do" and on the board.

[blim]

@Bearcat M_ Şándor Yes, the plan is to bring the new workflow editor to company-managed projects. Our team is currently working hard on that now, but to set expectations, we expect this to land 2 years from now. Let's keep in touch on how you could help us provide early feedback as we build towards this milestone.

Out of curiosity, what's preventing you from using team-managed projects over company-managed projects?

[blim]

@Josh Allen Thanks for the feedback, we're actively working on how to support the use case you described. We've seen some similar requests in the comments section on this ticket, but would you mind helping us create a new issue to track your feature request? :)

[blim]

@Wim Thanks for the feedback. In the long term, we will support multiple boards per project, please follow this issue if you haven't already: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17444. However, in the short term (in the next 2 quarters), we're hoping to release some navigation improvements which should make saving and mapping your workflow more efficient!

[Bearcat M_ Şándor]

@blim  I'm not your typical Jira user. I am a sole proprietor, and I'm using Jira to track my life so that I can schedual and balance my work, errands, care-giving, fitness regimine, and most of all my full-time studies at university as a near-50 year old. Sheesh! I'm also a long-term Linux user of 24 years and I like fine control.  Given that I work on my own, and the time I spend on my school work sometimes crosses my business work, I like seeing it all together.  As well, I have a set of custom fields that I like to use across all of my projects such as Monetary_Cost and Monetary_Gain.   I have a project called DEFAULT that I use as a basis for all new projects.

This would all be challenging with team-managed projects.

[Charles Gascon]

@Bearcat M_ Şándor : Hi ! This is not related to this specific page, but I saw your comment and realized this is exactly why I try to put in place in my JIRA project to track my life ! I would be interested to see how you organized your projects, what are your habits dealing with it (do you look at it daily ? several times a day?) and if you had any tips on the pitfalls to avoid from your experience. Should you be interested in sharing your experience, here's my email: gascon.charles@gmail.com. In all cases, have a good day !

[Rory Standley]

I'm also looking for this to be on Company based projects, this would be awesome!

[WynEMafY]

Champion.

[Stacy S]

@blim Is there any sort of update on when the ability to view multiple board workflows at once will be added to JIRA Work Management (i.e. to have a single common board view)?  It's very confusing to our end users to have to switch between workflows in order to see subsets of tickets within a project, and we're currently also trying to decide whether to set up a new project as Business (closest to our needs) or Software (excess in some, missing other features, but has a common board view, which is crucial to our end users). 

I already checked the roadmap and didn't see it explicitly mentioned there, and your earlier response only mentioned adding it to company-managed projects.  I appreciate any clarity you can provide.