What are the use cases for having Open and Reopened status on Jira workflows?

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

I observed that jira has two different statuses that do seem to overlap too much for my personal taste: Open and Reopened.

Please explain why these should be different instead of having only one, especially that I (suppose) that people could do a JQL query to detect the repopened ones.

Why I like the idea of having only one: less complex workflows are easier to understand and maintain. Also doing queries is easier.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I have to agree with Christian here. Some teams don't need "reopened", "open" is good enough.

Other teams really do need it. The classic case is support type stuff - the team resolves it, you reopen it because you don't think it's fixed. If you simply go back to "open", you have no idea that the team has had something old reopened. Yes, it's back in the to-do list, but you can't tell that it's a recurrence.

This is a bugbear with a lot of systems - developers/support closing things and not tracking that they're wrong because it has NOT been fixed.

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

Thanks Nic, I think you explained me the reason quite well https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow

[Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_]

I'm not with you on that one. Why should you do complex JQL searches when you can have all the possibilities (in terms of reporting and tracking) using the re-opened state. Re-opened indicates that an issues has been resolved or closed at one time which might be a valuable information. I'm thinking of "open" as "new" and re-opened as "far along the process but still in need of attention", indicating that sth. has changed since the issue has been resolved or closed....I'm working a lot with two-dimensional filters. Having multiple statuses gives me the opportunity to quickly scan the issues I have to work on, clustering those that have been re-opened and need another kind of attention than those having been created recently... But that's only my opinion :-) Cheers Christian