How can I have multiple starting points (status) in a workflow?

[Paul R]

Tying to have two starting points, depending on the type of the issues created. For example, want to have all "A type" issues start in the PENDING SETUP (no po) and have all "B TYPE" issues start in PENDING SETUP status. I'm not able to assign an incoming transition to the status depicted in the right. Any advice?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

You cannot have multiple starting statuses. Since you want type A to have a different starting status from type B you can do that by creating different workflows for the different issue types.

[Sorin Vasilescu]

I think that's a pity.

Consider this: I have a Kanban board with backlog enabled, so it has a "backlog" status and a "to do" status.

I'm on the board, not the backlog screen, cause we're running the board in the daily.

If the ticket I'm creating is not urgent, I want to create it in "backlog" status.

If the ticket I'm creating is urgent, I want to create it directly in "to do" status, so it shows up instantly on the board and I can drag it and prioritise it as I need.

I don't want to create the ticket in the backlog, wait for the notification to show up in the left-bottom corner telling me the ticket is not visible, click it to open the ticket overlay, change the status, close the overlay and only then wait for it to appear on the board.

Both tickets are the same type, the only thing that differs is urgency.

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Sorin Vasilescu It is really easy to work around it. In my previous life we had the option to put the issue in a "draft" status so that the user could come back and add more data before officially submit it. Draft was the initial status and issues were automatically transitioned to the next status unless they selected draft mode from a drop-down field.

[Wojtek Tomalik]

You can with a caveat: any statuses that can be transitioned from [any] state will show up as an initial state you can choose when creating a new ticket. The caveat of course is that this "second" status will have to bypass all other workflow transition limitations.

I noticed this because I have a [Cancelled] status that can be transitioned from anything. So when I create a new ticket, I can send it straight to cancelled, which is silly in that case.

So if [any] includes the "start" pseudo-status, then there is nothing technically stopping Jira from opening the possibility to have multiple start states, IMO.