How do you signify that a stage is "Done"?

[Jesse Dunlap]

My JIRA Portfolio project has two stages: Design and Development. These stages correspond to an issue status workflow my team is following in Kanban style. The process goes something like this:

Design

• Flowchart
• Wireframe
• Mockup
• Design Review
  

Development

• To-do
• In Progress
• In Review
• Done

The Design stage is noted as complete when issues are moved into To-do, and the Development stage is noted as complete when issues are moved into Done.

When using Portfolio's stages, there doesn't appear to be any way to map my issue statuses to stages.

So, for example, when I recalculate my plan, tasks that have already been completed in the Design phase are moved "forward" in the plan as if they still need to be completed.

Ultimately my question is how does Portfolio understand that different stages of a task are complete? 

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello Jesse,

Jira Portfolio does not support mapping workflow statuses to stages, that's a really interesting idea, though. Right now, the only way that you can mark a stage as "done" is if you set the estimate on that particular stage to 0, that signifies that no work is required for that stage.

That's obviously a manual step that would not scale well and we could look at getting a feature request in place.  Another thing to look at here is that stages are no longer used in the new experience Portfolio 3.0+, which is currently on Jira Server only but changes are coming for portfolio cloud in a similar fashion (More details on the changes surrounding stages currently in Server can bee seen here).

There is nothing concrete in place yet for what is coming to Portfolio in cloud and we understand there’s an interest in 3.0-like functionality in Cloud and we are exploring avenues to bring in similar functionality, and we're curious how you think the feature could be implemented better surrounding changes to stages.

I can’t speak to our teams commitments to this task or discuss timelines or an ETA, but we’re happy to share more about how our product line is evolving overall. For the latest on our Server and Cloud journey, check out this Summit Keynote from Europe Summit 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE22Ll6LIME&feature=youtu.be&t=1209

Also as we have more details for changes in Jira Cloud, we share our public roadmap "here". And we have another roadmap specifically for enterprise features that work across Atlassian products, here: https://www.atlassian.com/trust/roadmap. With both these resource, you should be able to keep tabs on our development in Cloud.

Regards,
Earl

[Jesse Dunlap]

Hi Earl,

Thank you for your detailed and well though out response. I'll give changing the estimates to 0 a try to see how that works for us. Portfolio is serving a really useful purpose right now which is helping me offer clarity to people at my company when we change our product roadmap (either by adding new work, as estimates change, or as people take PTO, for example).

I'm sad to hear that stages didn't make it into the new release of Portfolio, as I feel like acknowledging that work is done in sequential, often blocking pieces is something that other timeline planning tools miss out on. Not having that seems like an over-simplification of the actual complexity that goes into planning and software development. Portfolio won me over when I saw that it took that into consideration when calculating its plan. Doing this manually would be a tedious and complicated process that Portfolio has effectively distilled down into a button click.

That being said, I'm excited to see Portfolio 3.0, it looks like you have some good changes on the horizon, and I look forward to some of those coming to JIRA Cloud.

Thank you,

Jesse