Relationship between projects/types and workflows

[rpieszak]

New to JIRA, excited about its potential.

I have a custom workflow set up, and I'm starting to build screens for it, but I'm failing to see the relationship between projects/types and workflows. When I go to "Create Project" in the menu, it gives me a list of pre-defined project types. How do I get it to start stepping through my custom workflow?

Thanks for the help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

As a one off task, create a "workflow scheme". These say things like "In a project using me, use workflow AA for issue types 1 and 4, workflow BB for issue type 2, and workflow CC for all other types by default" (The most simple case is "default = my workflow")

Now, for each project, select any of the project types - I'd use the one that has the closest list of issue types to what you want.

Let Jira create the project, and then go straight into Project admin. Click on whatever workflow scheme it's set and look for "use another scheme" under the tools menu. Select the one you created above, and you're done (if you do this to projects that have issues in them, it will have to do some migration work, but it'll ask you about this before commiting anything)

[rpieszak]

Thanks for the reply Nic. If I understand you correctly, to utilize our custom workflow an admin would need to update each project that's created (currently there are none) and push it down the right workflow path. Is there any way for a regular user to create a project on their own without an admin's involvement?

In a perfect world, the user is presented with one option: chose your issue type, and their selection there would dictate the workflow that's used, which would begin immediately by pushing them to the next screen which asks for issue type-specific details. Does this make sense?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, you need to apply the scheme to the projects.

This is not something that should be left to the users, they *will* mess it up. Most of my jobs in Jira have started with "please undo the mess made because we let people do what they want". Although I'd agree with you on the "let SOME users have project create, and let them select pre-set templates", Jira does not (yet) have that level of granularity.

As for your perfect workd - that is already exactly how Jira works. If you have one project and no others, your user chooses an issue type, and that determines the workflow, and the fields they get. Job done. Have one project. (Or, even, many projects, but all using the same settings)

[rpieszak]

Okay, I think the "one project" method is what we need to go with. Instead of our work units being projects, they'll just be issues with workflows that match our project types. Examples: simple IT task, dev bug fix, larger dev project, information request, etc. Question: if we use a single project to manage all issues, even ones that are completely unrelated, how does that impact our ability to use the built-in Jira reporting? Is the reporting based on the project-level? Thanks.