Bug in editing a workflow

[Gerhard_Basson]

How is it possible that a software project workflow can change a service desk workflow in the background?

Steps taken by us:

• We copied a standard software project workflow 
• We edited the workflow by using 1 existing status (In Design)  and adding 2 new statuses (Ready to Ship & Shipped)
• We replaced the "In Progress" status with "In Design" and "Resolved" with "Ready to Ship". The Shipped was added as another 'done' status.
• We activated this workflow.
• We linked this workflow to a specific software project.

The UNEXPECTED Result in the default workflows created by Jira for our Service Desk project:

• ISD: Incident Management workflow for Jira Service Desk - "Resolved" was Replaced by "Ready to Ship"

• ISD: Problem Management workflow for Jira Service Desk - "Resolved" was Replaced by "Ready to Ship"

• The above was done for ALL workflows for a "Problem" type issue

• ISD: Service Request Fulfilment with Approvals workflow for Jira Service Desk - "In Progress" was Replaced by "In Design"

• ISD: Service Request Fulfilment workflow for Jira Service Desk - "In Progress" was Replaced by "In Design"

• And probably many more such replacements which I have not yet picked up.

This must be a BUG!

How do I correct this? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The problem is that you've not realised that the designed behaviour of Jira will do this.  This is not uncommon - the later versions of Jira seem to make this less clear to new admins, and a lot of people don't see it at first.

Status is shared object that a workflow refers to, it is not part of an individual workflow.

When an issue is at a step in the workflow, the step is configured to say "show the users the linked status from the global list".

Annoyingly, the workflow editor allows you to rename status while you edit a workflow, and that allows you to make global changes accidentally!

So, what I would do here is

1. Go to the global list of status and rename the status you've accidentally changed back to what they were before
2. While in the list of status, add the new ones that you want to use to the list
3. Go back to the new workflow and edit it, changing the (now renamed back to their original names) status associated with each step with the appropriate new status

[Gerhard_Basson]

Thank you, but:

1) I did not rename any status. I used what was available (In Testing) and added 2 new statuses.

2) I added these existing and new statuses to the modified workflow. I removed the "In Progress" status.

3) Why would Jira replace the "In Progress" status in another workflow with "In Testing"?

[Gerhard_Basson]

Sorry ... In Design (not In Testing)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The problem you describe will happen if you edit status while you're editing a workflow. 

If you are just selecting different status in a workflow, it can not affect other workflows.

To fix this, I would go to the ISD workflow that has changed and look at who last edited it, as if you were just selecting different status in the new workflow, it would not have changed the ISD one.

[Gerhard_Basson]

In the attached screenshots it shows - Last edited:

1) GLS: Gtrack Workflow: 15-Jan-2019

2) ISD: Service Request Fulfilment: 01-Nov-2018

3) ISD: Incident Management: 15-Aug-2018

It is evident no one updated the two ISD workflows recently.

But somehow when the Gtrack Workflow was updated, the other workflows were updated in the background by Jira.

I also went through the audit log to see what happened.

Thus it seems Jira updated the workflows without any warning to us.

It warned us about updating status names - that is why we did not do that. But not about updating workflows.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok.  The problem here is that there is no code in Jira that can do that in the background.

Workflow changes can only be done by administrators changing them, or changing the items they call out to (mostly, just status)

The only way that the changes to the Gtrack flow would affect other workflows is if a status was shared with the others and someone edited the status in the Gtrack flow.

[Gerhard_Basson]

Even if an administrator ignored the warning that a status value is used in other workflows and changed "In Progress" to "In Design", then surely "In Progress" will disappear as a status - but it is still there. 

And it was not replaced in all workflows: In Design has 28 associated workflows and In Progress has 14  associated workflows.

Even the default Jira workflow has been updated.

To resolve this, I will change the status to a value.

Do you know what is the default value used in the default Jira workflow 

- see attached Jira_004 & Jira_005. Obviously, I cannot rename this to "In Progress", because this is used by the standard Jira software workflows - see attached Jira_006.

Thank you.

Jira_004:

Jira_005:

Jira_006:

[Gerhard_Basson]

wrong box used