What is a 'step' in an inactive workflow? Cannot find a definition for 'step'.

[Holloway Winfred]

I see the term "step" in the "Working in text mode" documentation, but cannot find a definition for "step".  

Is "step" synonymous with "status"?

[I'm apologize for the 'dumb' question, I'm new to Jira workflows and want to really understand them before making updates which will negatively impact other projects.]

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

there is "Step name" which equates to status.

[Jack Brickey]

oh if you are looking at the bottom where you add a step then you give it a step name which again = status.

[Holloway Winfred]

Why confuse things?  Why not just say "add Status"?

[Holloway Winfred]

Is it to differentiate between existing 'status' and new ones?

[Jack Brickey]

I can’t answer that. In fact I never even use the text method of editing workflows. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Step and status are different things, although there is a strong 1:1 relationship between them.  Every step has a single status associated with it.

A step is an unamed thing that says "where the issue is in the workflow".  It has a unique identifier within the workflow, incoming and outgoing transitions, and properties.  One of the properties is always the status.  

A status is the object Jira puts in front of that, so we humans get context from it without having to read a pile of xml to work out what it means to us.  Status have a name, a category and their own properties.

The reason status and step are separate is that it enables you to change workflows, and share common data between them.  Every step in every workflow is unique within the workflow and hence globally too. 

You can change the status associated with a step within the workflow by simply reassociating it.  If step and status were the same thing, every status change to a workflow would require a complete rewrite and migration of the workflow.

And on the shared/global part, imagine you have a workflow that's as simple as 1 -> 2 -> 3 and a second that is 4 -> 5 -> 6 (because the steps have to be unique).  Problem here is that your desired status could be Open -> in progress -> Done and Open -> development  -> Done.  When you are reporting on this, you have 6 steps, and no way to say that the two Open and two Done are actually the same thing.  Because steps can be labelled with status, you can have different workflows reporting coherently.

I am not sure why you would want to differentiate between existing status and new ones.  A new status is, by definition, one you add, so the differentiation is just "it wasn't there until I had a reason to add it"

[Holloway Winfred]

Thank you Nic for the explanation.  Very much appreciated.

[Jack Brickey]

Yes Nic's answer was educational for me as well and is the best answer for sure.

[Tony]

Thanks so much Nic - couldn’t find any documentation on this and really wanted to understand what exactly “Steps” were - awesome job