Struggling to choose status and transition names for workflows

[Matt Baker]

I’m having a hard time coming up with meaningful and reusable names for our workflow statuses and transitions (mainly statuses). Are there any good resources to help with this? Just some lists of suggested status names would be useful. Kind of a thesaurus for status naming.  

[Ed Gaile _Atlanta_ GA_ · Accepted solution]

Hey Matt -

Your naming conventions will depend a lot on the process you are trying to handle with the workflows you define.

A workflow to handle defects may have different transitions/status' versus a workflow to handle a Feature Request.  

I tend to think of transitions as an action and a status as a state.  So, for example:

transition = Review Defect

status = In Review

Hope this helps,

-Ed

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I usually try to define the status first, as that leads you naturally to the transitions.

Also, I tend to try to frame status as adjectives and transitions as verbs.

For status, try to think of describing where the issue is in the process in a sentence - "this issue is new", "this issue is in test", "this issue is complete", and then shorten it - new, test, complete.

Then the same with the transitions "issue needs to go from new to in-progress" - shorten to "start work" for example.

[James K. Cope]

I'd like to add that another factor in status naming could be how you want to view your tickets in a Kanban -- especially a multi-project Kanban. I've worked on multi-project, tightly-knitted workflows spanning multiple projects and we started with shared status names. In order to make the view "friendlier for the overlords (lol)" we ended up actually using product keys in the status names so we would know WHAT was in progress without having to look at the project key.

So, someone is working on putting tires on the car and they work in the Tires project with a TIRES project key. Instead of saying "In Progress" when they were actually putting tires on the car, the ticket would show up as TIRES: In Progress.

Meanwhile, someone else is working another issue in a project called Windshield with a project key of WNDSH. Their work would show up on the master Kanban as WNDSH: In Progress.

Now, I admit, this was a unique application, but this naming really helped. The same would hold true with a single project for building cars with multiple holding (todo) queues and multiple in progress statuses. In that case, I'd name my statuses something like:

Queued for Tires

Tires in Progress

Queued for Windshield (or Windows)

Windows in Progress

But, I recognize this extremism is not for all cases. Right now I am working on a multi-project software development scenario where the statuses are identical across the projects (as are the issue types, schemes, etc.). In that case, In Progress means programmers are working on the issue.

Hoping this helps over a year later. :)