How common is it for a medium sized software company to deviate from the default workflow?

[saraponga]

I'm just curious as to how common it actually is for a medium sized software company who uses Jira for tracking their development projects, to deviate from the standard workflow provided by Atlassian.

How common is it to add a new status, for example?

[JamieA]

I think that the jira default workflow is at is for historical reasons rather than anyone stating that this is the "correct" workflow.

Some things strike me as nonsensical, for instance that there is a separate Reopened state. How is that different from Open? I think it's more likely that in jira 1 they put something together, and the upgrade process cannot cope with an automatic migration, hence it's just "stuck".

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

In my experience, Reopened is a popular status because lot of managers are interested in that. Shows how many issues were 'incorrectly resolved' or 'repeated often'!

If issue is in Open status, it is not that obvious.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yup, some of my teams don't care, so we remove "reopened". Others do, they want to know that something has been resolved and then chucked back, as opposed to being a new item. Although, we tend to rename "open" to "new" if we're using reopened, it makes it a bit more distinct.

[JamieA]

I agree that it's important to know that information, but at least now, there are better ways to get that information...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that didn't modify the workflow. Some core development projects stick with the defaults, but as soon as anyone tries to do anything other than simple development in a small team, new workflows are asked for.

[Alex Suslin]

It's fairly common, e.g. add new status Validated that means that the issue was succesfully passed QA tests.

Also it is common to have Approved or Waiting for Approval status or even delete almost all of them and have just open or closed for a very small startup )

[Renjith Pillai]

I am not sure whether this could be answered in one or two lines :)

But ofcourse adding of status (to match the known terms in your company) is quite common, and trimming down of workflows (for example removing of Resolved state) is also common.

Also the other side, for processes that involve multiple departments, for example finance related workflows, it tends to be very lengthy with multiple approvals, escalations statuses.