Advice on my first workflow

[Michael Arndt]

So this is my first workflow. I kept it pretty basic I believe.

I think the way I have it setup will allow tasks to be moved back and forth pretty freely.

Is there anything else i should know about this?

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

If you intend to use this in Jira's Agile Boards, it seems ok.  Generally you don't want all users to perform all workflow transitions, so you might want to eliminate some of the "all" transitions and add conditions to limit them as appropriate.  For example, you may not want engineers to move something from "Developing" to "Done" without the issue going through "Document" first. Your workflow does not prevent this. You may want your Project Managers to be able to do this in cases where you abandon an issue, though.  

My advice is to think of this as a v1.0. As you start using the workflow in the wild, you will quickly find out what isn't working as intended, so you can make changes in a series of iterations to tune as you go along.

Tweaks that I would definitely make are:

1. Check the Post-function (scroll to the "Post-function" section) in each transition and make sure that it is firing the correct event. It will default to "generic event," which may not be what you want.
2. On all transitions that terminate in Done status, you need to set a resolution.  This can be done via post-function or by using the existing or creating your own resolve screen that contains the "Resolution" field. You don't want things going in to "Done" without a resolution set or it will mess up some reporting, etc.
3. On all transitions that terminate in Done status, you should use a post-function to set the "Remaining Estimate" field to "0h" (zero hours) so that if you use time tracking, your burndown chart will display properly. It's good to do this even of you use some other method of estimation for user stories.

[Michael Arndt]

Hi David, thanks for the advice. I'm already seeing the reason for more granular control.

I'll check the documentation you provided tonight. 

I would see a need to able to push bugs and tasks directly to done but stories should be pushed along the workflow stage by stage. Is there a way to enforce such restrictions? I believe I saw it yesterday when I was working on this.