JIRA 7.0+ > Closed or Resolved or both?

Daryl Allison June 23, 2016

An issue either exists or it doesn't, if it once did then it was deleted.

While it exists, it's intuitive (from past experience) to consider the issue either open (action needing to be taken on it) or closed (no more action to be taken on it). Did JIRA 7.0+ do away with the paradigm of issues being open vs. closed? Is the paradigm now the unresolved vs. resolved? i.e. all issues have a Resolution field, and that field is either set to Unresolved or set to one of the valid resolution options. Or does JIRA 7.0+ support both 1) open vs. closed, and 2) unresolved vs. resolved?

I ask this because...

I can't find documentation related to closing and reopening an issue.

I can't find functionality related to closing an issue then reopening it.

I do, however, see notification triggers related to issues being closed and issues being reopened that I can hook into. Are these notification hooks legacy from pre 7.0 and waiting to be removed? or am I missing where these closed and reopen functions are hiding?

1 answer

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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June 23, 2016

No, it's been the same since version 1.  If an issue has a resolution, it's resolved and considered to be done with.

Agile and now Software have layered "done" on top of that, where it's done if it's in the right-hand column, and we have the colouring of status to help us visually too.

In both cases, admins have always had to have a bit of a think about the workflow, trying to ensure that a resolution is set as you go into an "ended" type status, and cleared if you move from one of those back into an "open" one.

Daryl Allison June 23, 2016

If that is the case, if resolved is synonymous with closed, what is the purpose/value of JIRA having both an "Issue Resolved" event and an "Issue Closed" event?

I see plenty of controls for the Resolution field. I see the way an issue appears changing when the Resolution field changes. I don't see anything related to an issue being closed.

If JIRA supports them as separate events, surely there is something elsewhere related to the "closing" of an issue?

Steven F Behnke
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June 23, 2016

Atlassian used to use Issue Resolved to indicate that the developer had chosen a Resolution. The issue was closed when QA had validated it, so in this case the Close Issue transition and Issue Closed event simply meant that QA had validated the developer's requirements. 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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June 23, 2016

Steven has given you info on events and resolutions, but, what happens when you don't have "closed" in your workflow?  JIRA currently depends entirely on the resolutions, and nothing else.

(Note - for a very long time, I've said resolution as the arbiter of open/closed should be binned in favour of team-oriented meta-status.  The colouring/category stuff we have with to-do/in-progress/done is a step towards that, but I don't now if it's going to carry on moving that way)

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