No Global workflow transitions in Jira 6?

[Brent Webster]

I upgraded from JIRA 5.2.11 to JIRA 6.3.6. All my global workflow transitions have been converted into regular transitions  The workflow has five statuses and I have 5 global transitions so I now have 25 unique transitions to update rather than five.

In 5.2.x, global transition could only be created using the "Diagram" side of the workflow editor but in 6.3.6 there is no such editing.  Have global transitions been removed in 6.x?  If so, I'm not impressed!!!!

[Nico van Leeuwen]

Major fail at Atlassian. The versatility of the workflow engine has been severely impacted as a result of this decision. Whatever happened to don't F*$!k the customer?  

[Brent Webster]

Atlassian, you are killing me.  When I did an previous upgrade test from 5.2.11 to pre6.3.11, I ran into this global transition issue where I had 36 unique transitions across my 6 statuses for my original 6 global transitions across 6 statuses.  When I upgraded to 6.3.11, it was back to 6 global transitions across my 6 statuses – great.  Now, I'm doing my final upgrade test but now it is 6.3.12 and I'm back to the 36 unique transitions – you guys are killing me.

[Danilo Conrad]

Hi Brent,

I am updating the reply from the support ticket in here for other customers who might have the same question:

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Hi Brent,

According to your description of the problem, I believe you had Global Transitions whose destination step were -1 (loop) on JIRA 5.2. Is that correct?

If that is the case, I believe you are facing the behaviour reported on the bug below:
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-38337 - The Workflow editor (Diagram) convert Recursive Global Transitions into Step Transitions

The main reason this happens is because loop transitions were removed from workflows on the new editor.
According the definition of the 'Global Transition' on our official documentation:

A global transition is one in which the destination step of the transition has all other steps in the workflow as incoming steps, but provides the added advantage of only requiring you to edit or update this transition in one place.

This feature still exists in JIRA 6.3 and may be enabled by marking the option "Allow all statuses to transition to this one", on the destination step you want.
Just like you have described, this will allow you to edit a single transition, and the change will take effect for all steps which transition to the destination step using this Global Transition.

In case the missing functionalities from the new editor impact your business, we would love to hear your feedback and you may provide it in the ticket below:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-33692 - Feedback on the workflow designer

We have also a feature created requesting the loop transitions back on the new workflow editor:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-36498 - Global looping transitions in new workflow editor
You may vote on it to increase its visibility with development, and also add yourself as a watcher to be notified of any updates on that issue. This improvement will be addressed by our developers according to our Implementation of New Features Policy.

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Cheers,

Danilo

[Brent Webster]

I'm finding the workflow diagram editor is worst than the 5.2 version.  The converted workflow transitions are overlaid one on top of another.  All the ex-global transitions show up as a self transitions (UML terminology) and for each status, it looks like one self transition but instead it is 5 self transitions, one on top of another.  Trying to move the transition endpoints is next to impossible.

I started reading the 6.3 admin documentation where they talked about selecting a status and enabling "Allow all statuses to transition to this one" but that is not the intent of the 5.2 global transition.  In 5.2, the global transition is a self transition available on every status that I only need to edit once.   Has the design intent changed – not impressed if that is the case.