Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 2. Resolved, Resolution, and Resolution Date

Overview

One thing that sometimes confuses both JIRA users and administrators is the difference between the Resolved status and the Resolution field. This chapter clears up some of the confusion between these very similar-sounding terms. The differences are summarized at the end of this chapter (“Summary”).

Getting this right is important, because many of the standard JIRA reporting gadgets on dashboards expect the Resolution field to be set as expected—otherwise confusing results occur. For example, gadgets that refer to the date when issues were resolved use the Resolution Date field, which is in turn based on the Resolution field.

Resolved

JIRA comes with a default workflow (Administration→Issues→Workflows) named jira, shown later in Figure 5-1 and summarized below in Figure 2-1. This workflow has the following statuses for an issue, shown in the order they commonly occur.

Figure 2-1. Default JIRA workflow

The idea is that an issue (such as a bug) is created with a status of Open, and is then moved to In Progress and then Resolved by the person who fixes it. The bug is then moved to either Closed or Reopened by someone who checks whether it really was fixed or not. So Resolved is just a name for an issue status. The status could just as well have been named Believed Fixed or Ready for Testing.

Caution

If you create a workflow from ...