Why are "In Progress" Tasks disappearing from my Scrum Backlog?

[James Daniel]

This is very odd, but we are experiencing 2 specific issues here. We have 1 Project in which we have 2 Scrum boards for. Each board, we are splitting up the Dev work by two Dev teams and leveraging Components. 

Team1 uses Stories, Bugs, and Epics.

Team2 uses Tasks, Defects, and Epics.

Each team has their own backlog on their boards and we can see the 100+ items for each team's backlog. The crazy part is for Team2, anytime the Task goes to "In Progress" status, it completely disappears off the Backlog. When I find the Task and click the Stop Progress button to send it back to "Open" status, it appears once again in our backlog.

Our project has two specific different workflows, one for Team1 (Stories, Bugs) and one for Team2 (Tasks, Defects). For whatever reason, I cannot even find the "In Progress" status under the unmapped columns within the board configuration and our board filter is literally just this for the board:

project = "XYZ" AND component = Team2

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

This looks like the workflow you have in the screenshot is not in use in project XYZ.

Could you show us the workflow scheme for project XYZ, from within the project settings (not the global workflow scheme list)?  (Feel free to fuzz over project identifiers, we just need to check what workflows the project is actually using)

[James Daniel]

Great catch - looks like you are spot on! So it looks like our project is only using the one workflow scheme that doesn't include "In Progress" statuses :)

Are we capable of having the Project use more than 1 Workflow Scheme?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, a project can only use one scheme.

But the point of the workflow scheme is to tell a project what workflows to use for each issue type.

A simple default workflow scheme might say simply:

• default:  use the workflow called "Bob"

But you can easily do something like:

• default:  use the workflow called "Bob" 
• Bug: use the workflow called "Bob's bugs"
• Story: use the workflow "Bob's bedtime story"
• Feature: use the workflow called "Bob's bugs"
• Question: use the workflow called "ask a question"

(The default will kick in for issue types not specifically named, so stuff like tasks, sub-tasks, penguin-wrangling, etc - all will use "Bob" by default)

[James Daniel]

Wonderful - I will go ahead and make request the default workflow scheme to be the "jira workflow" and then since we are already calling out our specific one for Stories/Bugs, I am hoping things can remain the same for our other board that is using all those other specific statuses. Thank you so much for the help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Good plan!

When you get the workflow schemes changed, remember that you'll need to update the board configs too - the column mappings are likely to remain wrong, Jira has no code that makes assumptions about where newly added status (I mean "to the project", not just new status) might be mapped.  But it should show all the status that are in the workflows you've added to the project, at least in the grey unmapped column!