What is a good workflow for an ongoing task, I would like to keep the issue alive?

[Gabriel Palomarez]

I have routine work that we do on a monthly quarterly schedule.  I want to keep the task alive because it's important that we maintain the historical comments in one location.  What is a good workflow I can use to implement this?  There are several operational routine tasks that also follow this dynamic.

[Sam Nadarajan · Accepted solution]

Hello @Gabriel Palomarez , and welcome to the Community!

You could configure a simple workflow "To Do > In Progress > Review > Waiting" and have the waiting status serve as your holding tank until you're ready to work on it again, then it can move to the To Do process.

After some time though the historical comments will become pretty cumbersome and the value will decrease if you have to keep clicking "Show More" and expanding. Also, you may find users will stop referencing the comment thread altogether if it gets more unwieldy.

What I would recommend is if you have an ongoing type of task, to have an automation rule that automatically generates it every month. You could even throw a specific label or set a value on the task so you can query tasks of that particular type/category. In this way, you wouldn't have a circular workflow, but you'd still have the traceability.

Hope this helps

[John Funk]

Hi Gabriel - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Well, I think there are various ways to do this. One is to create the issue as an Epic and leave it open and record comments there. Then create individual tasks under the Epic to record and do the work. You would set those up as recurring tasks and have new ones created when the original ones are closed. There are some third party apps that help with creating the recurring tasks, or here is an article I wrote that shows how to do it without add-ons:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Creating-a-Flexible-Recurring-Need-Issue/ba-p/2040862#M6570

Or can you not worry about the Epic and just create the recurring tasks. Then you could have a trail back to previous issues if you needed to see comments related to each one. 

Or you could create a Task that stays open and record comments there, and then create Sub-tasks for your recurrent items. 

To me, the easiest would be the middle option - but up to you!