Small improvements for a better diagram view of the new workflow editor

[#1]

Updated June 14th, 2024 to add new Assignee functions

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Hello my favorite Jira admins!

I'm a Product Manager bringing workflow improvements to Jira Cloud. I’m excited to share the improvements we’re making with the intent of making the diagram user-friendly, especially with complex workflow configurations. In particular, we’ve:

• Updated the display of global transitions and lozenges

• Making transition labels collapsable

• Updated the Display of shared transitions *

• Added the Assignee functions of the old editor to the new one

*this is available in company-managed projects for now, but we do plan to bring it to team-managed projects later

I’ll quickly run you through these changes. Let us know in the comments what else you’d like to see!

Updated diagram view of global transitions and lozenges

Imagine you made a workflow using the old editor view, and you later go to edit it in the new Editor view. But it’s so hard to read, things are misaligned, and where did my clean workflow map go?!

We heard your feedback and redesigned how the global transitions and the status lozenges shows up in the new editor view.

It might be hard to tell from this very simple image, but this small design tweak makes large workflows easier to read. So the only thing you’ll need to worry about is whether your workflow aligns with how your company works – not how hard it is to read.

Collapsable transition labels

With this change, we brought the collapsable transition labels to the New Workflow editor for both CMP and TMP projects.

When you're managing workflows in the New editor, you can hide transition elements to reduce the amount of clutter on your screen. Oh, happy days!

More compact display of Shared transition

Lastly, we have new Shared transitions in the New Workflow Editor for company-managed projects.

These lines for Shared transitions are more compact which should help reduce clutter on busy workflow diagrams, as shown below:

This also brings it more in line with how shared transition is shown in legacy workflow editors in company-managed projects.

For right now, this change only applies to company-managed projects; support for team-managed projects will come later.

Assignee workflow steps from the old editor are now in the new

This change brings the Assignee functions from the old workflow editor to the new one. You can now do the following for both company-managed and team-managed projects: - Assign to current user, lead developer, or reporter - Update issue field such as assign issue to a specific user, remove assignee, assign to automatic (default assignee)

Let us know what you think

Love the new changes? want to see more? Leave a comment here to let us know how you feel, or raise a feature request ticket. Your request might be our next big project!

[David Berclaz]

Hi @Yuan Jiang

Thanks for those improvements, waiting for the changes to be available on my instance ;-)

Cheers,

David

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for the information, @Yuan Jiang 

For the change to show / collapse the transition labels, did the team consider having an additional visual indicator when the labels are collapsed?  For example, use a different line shape / style, rather than have the same line for transitions with no action / condition.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Pratiksha Kate]

Hi, 

What are shared transitions?

I am aware of Common and global transitions. 

Best regards, 

Pratiksha Kate

[P.D. Foerster]

Thanks for the updates.

Here my 2 cents about the changes:

Global transitions and lozenge

IMHO the position would be better in one of the status corners, e.g. in the top right.

According to the screenshot the Any lozenge is positioned on the right side now.

In large workflows with a lot of transition you need all the space of a status to show incoming transition. For example if you have 10 incoming transition to a status it is difficult to distribute the incoming transition arrows between all the anchor points of a status in the editor.

Collapsable transition labels

This is available in the old editor. Forgive me but collapsible indicates that there is still something to see / read but well collapsed. In the old editor (at least on server / DC) it was called hide transition labels. I think this is more clear.

More compact display of Shared transition

I can't really tell the difference here. Is 'Shared' the name of the transition in this screenshot or are you displaying that this transition's type is 'Shared', i.e. meaning common transitions?

Can you explain this more, please?

To be honest, from the screenshot I can't really see an improvement but that may be because I'm a Jira admin for a very long time :D

Other improvements

I really don't know why but in the earlier days of Jira server (<= 4.x) there was an option auto-layout in the workflow editor that automatically did the positioning of statuses and transitions so that it looked nice in most situations and only few adjustments had to be made.
I've seen this feature in other diagramming softwares over the years and it would be great to have this back in Cloud and Data Center as well.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

I like the changes in the workflow editor.

Would the shared transitions be displayed like that on the View Workflow option available on the Issue Detail View? If that were the case, it would confuse users, but I don't think it is the case, since this announcement is just about the workflow editor, right?

[Morgan Watts]

I too am curious about the "shared transitions" and their impact/what exactly are they? 

I do like the changes; I think the more compact workflows will help massively with editing and creating. 

[Scott Fannen]

I'm going to guess here that "shared transitions" are (the long standing feature) where you reuse the same transition to save time and effort.

Example: when you have a multiple "Resolve" transitions to "Done" status from a lot of other statuses and rather than set all the validations, conditions and post functions separately, you set it up on one transition and re-use it.

The "Shared" name in the diagram probably makes us think it's new - although the little icon along with name is new and probably makes it more obvious that the shared transition is being used at a glance.

Sorry in advance a) if this is an incorrect presumption and b) if it's correct - but obvious to many :)

[Chris Lee]

Can we please have a group select function for Data Center? Formatting the layout is tedious when you're limited to moving one element at a time.