How to set column to be a to do instead of a in progress column?

[Almighty Drake]

Hi,

I have a problem with setting a new column being a to do column. It always turns to Progress column, even though I marked it in to do while creating a new column in board configs. There are already to do columns but does it matter? 

I am grateful for every answer

best regards.

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Almighty Drake ,

There is a difference between columns on a board and statuses. Statuses (which are part of your workflow) have a status category. And as your indicate, there are 3 categories: to do (grey), in progress (blue) and done (green). You determine this status category when you create a new status. They are useful when you want to search for issues and you want to avoid listing every individual status in your search.

As an example, the following filters return the same result:

statusCategory = "In Progress"

and:

status in ("In Analysis", "Ready for Dev", "In Development", UAT)

Board columns just help you make the issues visible throughout your workflow. While you can map statuses to columns, they work slightly differently. Boards are very simple - simplified if you like. The first column is to do, the last column is done and everything else is considered to be "In progress". You cannot configure this differently.

While that may seem a bit strange, it does have benefits. If you configure a complex workflow for issues that are handled by different teams, some parts of your workflow may be end states for one team and at the same time to do states for another team. You can configure different boards for each team, where the mapping that same status to the last column on one board and on the first column of the other board creates a sort of handover from one team to the other.

Hope this helps!