Kanban - Restriction on number of States defined

[Lee Street]

Jira Experts,

Is there a restriction for Scrum and Kanban workflow states in Jira?

Im being told by a Jira Admin only 4 states should be used irrelevant of what the actual flow is?

Is there a restriction in Jira or something?

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Lee,

No, there is not restriction on the number of statuses that you can use in a workflow. However, you will see a performance hit at some point (dozens of statues). But saying that only 4 should be used and no more is simply ridiculous in my opinion. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Adding on...

When you have a lot of Statuses it can also be difficult to view the issues in the board if each of the Statuses is in a separate column.

And many Statuses can make the workflow difficult for end users to understand.

I concur with @John Funk  that arbitrarily imposing a limit of 4 Statuses doesn't seem reasonable. I would recommend working with your administrator to get an understanding of why they want to impose the limit.

Out of curiosity, how many Statuses do you want to have in your workflow?

[Lee Street]

@Trudy Claspill I have asked for 7 States.  Our Jira Admin has informed us that this many should not be used.  We are unsure why though?

[Lee Street]

@John Funk @Trudy Claspill Thank you both for responding

[John Funk]

They should explain to you why that is the case. It is certainly not Kanban principles. How are they implementing a pull system using Kanban?

[Trudy Claspill]

I concur with @John Funk . Your administrators should be able to provide an explanation and suggest alternatives.

If you want to present your workflow here in your thread perhaps we can make suggestions about paring it down.