Can I compose workflows?

Jim Downing February 22, 2013

I'm trying to combine two workflows - one for defect issues that describes how a bug is triaged, that ends up placing the bug in an "Open" state, and another that handles the fixing of the bug in a second feature / story development workflow. The second workflow is used by a different project that creates issues directly into 'open'.

The simple solution here is to replicate my dev workflow at the tail of my defect workflow, but that sucks from a maintainabiity perspective.

I don't really want to move the issue to a different project with the second workflow (from the defects projects to the development project), as the first project loses visibility of the issue (and there's no support for this in the transition actions I have in any case).

Another non-solution would be to use issue types, so a 'bug report' would go through the defect workflow, and get changed to a 'bug' when accepted, so that the workflow scheme would use a different workflow. Except that a) you can't change type in a transition post function and b) changing the issue type doesn't seem to trigger a change in the attached workflow.

Is it possible to create linked issues that sync all their fields aside from status?

Is there a smooth solution to this?

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MJ
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 24, 2013

You can use different workflows for different issue types within the same project. Details on workflow schemes can be found here, configuring workflows them self can be found here. In order to link issues to eachother and keep there fields synced between them, I would suggest you use sub-tasks. From the parent issue you can create a sub-task, which will be associated with a separate workflow (if you have configured it this way). Through post functions you can copy/sync field values between the parent and child issues. Details on sub-tasks can be found here and here.

Jim Downing February 24, 2013

Hi Mick, thanks for the answer.

One of the reasons I wanted to have them in different projects was that I'd like different permissions for the creation of defect reports and direct creation of dev tasks. As far as I can see, an issue can't have a parent in a different project?


If I were able to import workflows using XML in OnDemand that would help - then I could have my defects workflow 'inherit' from my dev workflow, and use source control to merge changes to my dev workflow into the defects project workflow. I can see that this isn't an option, but why not?

MJ
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 25, 2013

Correct, parent and child issues have to be within the same project. As for the second section of your comment, this is at the moment not possible. You could use issue level security schemes to shield off issues from being accessed by specific users, which might create the same situation for you as you are looking for within the same project opposed to working with separate projects. Importing from XML is not possible in OnDemand, you can however look at the import from marketplace option to see if there are any workflows beneficial to you.

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