Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 5. Creating a Workflow from Scratch

Overview

Workflows are the different statuses that an issue can have, together with the transitions between the statuses. For instance, there could be a status named Open, with transitions leading to the Resolved and Closed statuses.

Tip

The word status is preferred over using state in the JIRA documentation (and also in this book), but in practice they seem to both be used interchangeably. One useful notion is that a status is a summary of states. For example, someone’s medical status could be summarized as normal based on the state of their heart, the state of their liver, and so on. In a similar way, a JIRA status is a summary of what is going on in an issue

Transitions in JIRA workflows usually go from one status to another status. However you can also define shared transitions (also known as common transitions) which go from many statuses to one status. There are also global transitions which go from every status to one status. Finally, self transitions are transitions that return to the same status they started from.

JIRA workflow transitions can also optionally have extra triggers, conditions, validators, and extra post functions:

• Triggers make the transition occur when an external event is received. This can be used for integrating JIRA with other systems.

• Conditions restrict who can see that a transition exists.

• Validators check the values that were entered during a transition. JIRA has almost no useful validators installed, but ...