JIRA Agile and Workflows

JIRA Agile, formerly known as GreenHopper, is a popular JIRA add-on by Atlassian that allows you to manage issues in a more agile way. This means Kanban, Scrum, sprints, burndown charts, and a whiteboard-like active sprints board where you can drag issues from status to status. You don’t even have to be working in an agile way to appreciate it. So it’s very popular indeed. JIRA Agile cards are simply JIRA issues displayed differently, so of course each card uses a JIRA workflow. The difference is that JIRA Agile lets you assign multiple statuses to columns on the Active Sprints (Work) board. For example, the column named To Do could have issues in the Open and Reopened statuses. When designing a workflow for use in a JIRA Agile board, there are a few points to remember. ColumnsDefine the names for your JIRA Agile columns and decide which JIRA statuses should be mapped to each column. You can have statuses that don’t map to any of your columns, and in fact this is sometimes a useful way to keep issues from appearing on a board. TransitionsIf you want to be able to drag an issue from any column to any other column, you will need to have a transition from every status to every other status. A regular JIRA workflow is often shaped like a ladder or diagonal, but a workflow for use in JIRA Agile is more like a fully connected circle. You’ll at least need a transition to one of the statuses in every column to allow cards to be dragged. This is an O(N2) number of transitions. A better approach is to define a common transition for entering each status. That way you only have to define as many as the number of statuses in the workflow. The Agile Training Simplified workflows that JIRA Agile can create are just the statuses with a global transition to every status. This means that you’ll see transitions back to the same status in every issue which can confuse some users. You also need to check that the system Resolution field is set properly in these generated workflows. You can add multiple conditions to a transition and even have levels of combinations of them. However I recommend avoiding complicated conditions that restrict who can change an issue’s status, or you’ll have users who are frustrated that they can drag issues to some columns but not other columns. Transition ScreensMany people like to avoid transition screens with JIRA Agile. When they’re dragging issues from one screen to another, they don’t want to have pop-ups interrupting them. This is fine except for transitions that need to set a resolution. The resolution can be set in a post function, but which resolution to choose? I recommend choosing the most frequent resolution, then add another transition between the same two statuses with a transition screen that lets you choose a resolution. When the issue is dragged to a column where the resolution should be set, two small areas will appear named after each transition. One could be Completed since it sets the resolution with no pop-up screen, and the other could be named something such as Close – Other. NotificationsPeople drag issues around on the work board without realizing that they are sending out email about status changes. You may want to use a custom event for some transitions and prevent the notification scheme from sending out email for that event.

Senior Software Developer at Mindmajix Technologies Inc, I have been successful as Senior Technical Consultant, project lead, manager and individual contributor.