Worst Jira Admin Contest: Multiple Green Statuses

[#1]

Mistake 7

Do your users keep Jira issue status in sync with reality? In my experience, they do not. Issues are often forgotten about in certain statuses. Does this happen in your application? Then, read on!

Admin > Issues > Statuses

Status Categories

In Jira, statuses are classified into one of three categories: “To Do”, “In Progress”, or “Done”. In modern versions of Jira, “To Do” statuses are grey in color, “In Progress” statuses are blue, and “Done” statuses are green. The categories help visually communicate where issues are in their lifecycle. Issues in a “To Do” status category are at the beginning of the workflow, issues in a “In Progress” status category are in the middle, and issues in a “Done” status category are towards the end. The category names and colors are not customizable.

Resolved and Closed

The standard “Resolved” and “Closed” statuses are both in the green “Done” category.

For quite some time, I didn't understand how "Resolved" and "Closed" were used together in workflows. When presented with both transition options, users didn't understand which to select either. This led to issues considered "done" in either status! There was no way to report the total work "done" without manually adding counts from the two statuses together. Issues languished in "Resolved" status until I figured this out and took it out of workflows where it wasn’t needed.

Multiple Green Choices

Ick! Dupes of dupes.

My opinion: There should only be one status where it's clear that no additional effort is required. The standard "Closed" status or the business project-friendly "Done" status is sufficient. There’s no need to create a “Completed” or a “Finished” status too!

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[Matt Doar]

This one is trickier for me. I like the idea of one, true final status such as Done. But I know that sometimes people want to set a system Resolution value such as Won't Do in the transition to a final status and call the status "Cancelled" or some such. I guess a JQL query on 

status is not empty and resolution = "Won't Do"

would work as well as having multiple final statuses.

However the use of both "Complete" and "Completed" is a clear source of confusion, coming right up!