New Features: Additional Done Statuses + Map Multiple Statuses per Column for Jira Software Next-gen

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community,

My name is Bryan Lim and I'm a Product Manager working on Jira Software.

Today, I'm pleased to announce the launch of two features that give Jira Software next-gen (soon-to-be-named team-managed!) workflows more power and flexibility.

1. You can now assign additional statuses to a Done status category (for example, you can set your “Won’t Fix” status to a Done status category), so that you can accurately reflect the status of your team's work.

2. You can now map more than one status per column on the board, and each status will be represented as a drop zone on your board’s column, so that you can keep your board tidy.

Tutorial

As your team triages incoming issues, you may come across issues that you decide you “Won’t Fix” due to various reasons (e.g., a reported bug is actually expected behavior). Now, we’ve allowed you to add additional Done statuses via the Workflow Editor:

1. Navigate to the Workflow Editor

2. Click on the add a “Done status” button on the top menu:

3. Type in a name for your new status, press the return key, and click "Add" to add your status:

4. Feel free rearrange your statuses (by dragging and dropping each status) to depict your team's workflow. When you're finished, click “Save and close”

5. (Optional) Highly recommended: If you’re running sprints, please map your Done statuses to the last column. To do this, open your new “Configure board” setting via the board:

6. Drag and drop the “Won’t Fix” status to the Done column and delete the Won’t Fix column:

7. Press save changes, and notice that the “Done” and “Won’t Fix” statuses are now represented as drop zones in the last column when you drag and drop issues on the board:

Pro Tips

• 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

• If you are running sprints, we suggest you map your terminal status to the last column. 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.

What’s next:

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

1. Different workflows per epics

2. Different workflows for all issue types

3. Ability to unmap statuses from the board

Feel free to voice your feedback for these features (or your feedback for Next-gen, in general) on this thread.

Best regards,
Bryan

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for this information about the evolving features.

With this and other changes, it will be interesting to see how Classic (company-managed projects) and Next-Gen (team-managed projects) feature sets converge and diverge...  Perhaps moving more toward a feature inheritance/override model like in competitor products.  Anything to reduce the complexity of "what works where and when and why" will no doubt be appreciated by the community of customers.

Thanks for the improvements!

[Vero Rivas]

Hi @blim 

   Many thanks for sharing, is very interesting.

Cheers

[Sarah Elmer]

Now bring back the capabilities to have transitions to specific users WITHOUT having to pay an arm and a leg for an addon!!!!!!!

[Ravi Tata]

Would be great to have the ability to have Epics and Version panel turned on at the same time in next-gen. Currently its a either-or, i.e in Backlog view you can either see Epics panel or Versions panel

[blim]

@Sarah Elmer Can you tell me a little more? Can you give me an example use case?

[Sarah Elmer]

Blim - Been with Atlassian since 2010. Used to be able to transition to an assignee. Now cannot unless we purchase JMWE. We're a small company and can't afford an additional $500 a month for JMWE. This has caused so many problems I can't count them. Some changes are great, but older clients should be "grandfathered" in. Put a ticket in to see what can be done and got slammed by JMWE to purchase. Yeah... right.... Spent many hours on this with support and the more time I spent, the madder I got.

[blim]

@Sarah Elmer Ah, interesting, unfortunately I can't speak on behalf of the Appfire developers (the author of JMWE). Would the out-of-the-box rules we provide in next-gen suit your use case? Check out these rules listed here:
1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Feature-Announcement-Jira-Software-Next-gen-Workflows/ba-p/1545178

2. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Next-gen-workflow-transition-rules-inspiration-Assign-an-issue/ba-p/1616343

Let me know if these Rules help or not!

[Raj Shrestha]

These new features will certainly going to be helpful at least for me. And thanks for the pro tips. I am so much excited about it.

[Jimi Wikman]

I am curious... with all the flexibility and amazing ways you can build your own reality within your next-gen project, how will that fit with steering products such as Advanced Roadmap and Align?

It seems that these new features will cause a severe divergence, making steering very difficult on a mid- to large sized company?

This new status setup with multiple closed statuses, does that mean that next-gen projects will no longer use the resolution feature in classic projects?

[Ted]

We actually use JMWE, not a bad product, but the cost is high. Will these changes you are implementing replace JMWE?

We use is for some fairly complex onboarding and offboarding employee workflows.

[Parag Ahire]

Hello, is the feature feature of mapping multiple status values to Done only available in Next Gen (Team Managed) version ? How do I know if my installation is Next Gen or not?

I do not see a Manage Workflow option on the board when I click the three dots when on the board.

I can get to the Workflow Editor but the screen is not the same as shown above. The JIRA installation is company managed one.

Our intent is to make Aborted and Done as Green (as in done).

[Parag Ahire]

@blim Can you please comment on my question above ?

[Michael Schmidt Linneberg]

I'm curious about the need for adding the 'done' status to the far right... I've for a couple of sprints now had two done status; (1) 'done' and (2) 'won't do, can't reproduce'. What I would've expected is that all issues being dragged into these columns would be logged in the sprint where they were moved. But what happens is that only the issues in the (2) 'won't do, can't reproduce' status get's marked as completed meaning that all the issues in the (1) 'done' status is transferred to the next sprint. 
I would've expected that issues in both statuses would be marked completed and not move to the next sprint. Anything I'm doing wrong or is this a know issue that you're working on?

[Vandana.Kareer]

@blim I Have DONE as my final column. In Sprint 1 all stories were marked as DONE. But when I closed the SPRINT they were still seen as OPEN issues and all my DONE stories are now in Sprint 2. Please advise how I can ensure anything marked as DONE does not move into the next sprint?

[blim]

@Parag Ahire Currently this is only available for team-managed projects. We're working hard to bring the experience to all of Jira Software

[blim]

@Michael Schmidt Linneberg Currently we assume we assume that work moves from left to right on a board as your team completes work during a sprint.

The best practice recommendation we have is to map all your "Done" statuses to the last column. However, I understand this may be seen as a workaround. Can you give me more context on what value it brings your team to have two separate columns for 'Done' vs. 'won't do, can't reproduce'?

[blim]

@Vandana.Kareer strange. Would you mind capturing a screenshot? I can't seem to reproduce this behavior

[Michael Schmidt Linneberg]

@blim Thanks for getting back to me. We managed to find a solution. Just had to dig a little to find out how to categorise stages properly. 

[valentyna_severina]

Hi @blim, how can I make 3 "done" statuses in 3 columns?

My team has columns as "to do, on hold, in progress, code review, on dev, tested on dev, on stage, done". In our workflow, we consider "tested on dev, on stage, done" columns as "done". But when we set these statuses as "done" it doesn't work on the dashboard/insights panels, so right now our tasks are completed only when they're in the last right column "done" with "done" status, that's not really convenient for our work.

[Pat Heck]

@valentyna_severina Did you ever come to any conclusion on your multiple done statuses? We are debating this as we start using Aha. There are some that want to create two done statuses ("ready for release" and "released"). But others state that you should NOT move an issue from one done status to another done status...that done means just that... the issue is finished...and that if there are multiple done statuses, they represent different reasons for reaching a terminal state. The common example that Atlassian shows is "Done" and "Won't Fix". Both get mapped to done, but the implication is that you do not move an issue from "Done" to "Won't Fix" or vice versa. And the fear of those arguing against it is based completely on reporting.