Jira statuses best practices

[Joan Andreu Juan Torrens]

I have a colleague that likes to have as much statuses as situations can happen to issues in a Jira Work Management project.

In my opinion that makes the board view less effective. I trend to simplify statuses to a maximum of 6. For example, I prefer to have just one finished status (DONE) and use the resolution field to determine how has ended.

What I would like to know is if there is any guide or best practices article from Atlassian about that theme that I can read and learn from.

Thank you !

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ · Accepted solution]

@Joan Andreu Juan Torrens Sometimes less is better! 😅

My experience showed that most workflows can be optimized and that instead of having 20+ statuses, you can have around 7-8.

Things get unnecessarily complicated and this ends up with not so good user experience. 
It's potentially okay if you have one or 2 complex flows within the organization, but if each team/project has those, the site would probably end up being too chaotic.

I remember reading or hearing one sentence from an admin who worked in an enterprise organization something like:

...after revision, we noticed that 90% of projects could use a simplest workflow which contained 3 statuses - "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done". And users were completely fine with that...

Again, how you'll implement something highly depends on the processes and policies within the company, but I would recommend trying to 'globalize' everything; especially when it comes to statuses, resolutions, custom fields...

If this particular project needs to have more statuses > fine. But don't name those statuses 'project-specific' and instead think of names that could be reused in the future (but, before that, try to reuse existing/system statuses as much as possible).

Cheers,
Tobi

[Joan Andreu Juan Torrens]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts. You are right, every project needs a reflection but always thinking in reuse.

And sometimes maybe to-do, in-progress, done can work, but sometimes you need just a bit more.

[Ivan · Accepted solution]

Hei @Joan Andreu Juan Torrens 

maybe this one helps you out a bit? According to Atlassian, while Jira supports adding a status for every part of your team's process, it's important to note that each additional status and transition can add complexity to the workflow. To maintain agility, it's advisable to keep your process lean.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/best-practices-for-workflows-in-jira/

[Joan Andreu Juan Torrens]

Thanks a lot for that article!

I will make sure my colleague read it ;-)