How to distinguish between tasks that have been started and tasks that have not been started?

[ercion]

I'm new to Atlassian Community and a bit confused at how to explain my question. Please bear with me as I try.

In Jira Software, let's say that a developer completes his task and moves the issue to QA where it's automatically assigned to someone. Eventually, there will be more than 1 tasks assigned to 1 person. Now if anyone wants to know which tasks are being actually worked on at the moment (like the client, for instance), how can he see this?

What I've tried:

1. Intermediate status. For each status, create a "Ready for..." status. But I have a feeling that this approach will create a mess.
2. Use a custom field. Using a custom field, see if an issue is being worked on or not. But I think expecting everyone to keep this field updated would be naive.
3. Have multiple categories (todo, in progress) for for a status. Is this even doable in Jira?

Does a related functionality already exist in Jira that I don't know about? Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

[Antoine Berry]

Hi @ercion ,

You could use the Log Work feature and add a quickfilter on the board, something along the lines of 

worklogAuthor = currentUser() 

Antoine

[ercion]

I see. So a user will be able to see all the tasks where he has logged time. But unfortunately, it doesn't solve my problem. Correct me if I'm wrong. Example: after a developer logs time on it, and passes it on to QA, no-one will be working on the issue but the issue will still be shown with the quickfilter you mentioned.

[Antoine Berry]

You are right. There is no perfect solution ; alternatively you could use quickfilters such as 

worklogAuthor in (developer1, developer2, ...)

worklogAuthor in (QA1, QA2, ...)

Regarding your proposals, a few remarks as well : 

1. A general rule of thumb is to limit the amount of statuses in a workflow, so I would advise against that, but if you can keep it maintanable/readable why not ? I actually have some workflows with statuses such as "Being tested".

2. This is a good solution if users actually use it. You might want to reset the field within the transitions though.

3. This is not doable in Jira. 

[ercion]

Thanks Antoine.