How can I create a status category? (2024)

I'm New Here

At first it was frustrating but thinking about it and the ripple effects to Releases and out of the box Reporting for example it's understandable that Atlassian have made the decision. If you think about it any work item (in or out of work) is either 'To Do', 'In Progress' or 'Done'. If you want to sub-categorise where something is within those statuses it's entirely possible in JIRA as it is in life.

Build your board(s) based on a filter that doesn't include 'new' as the 'working board', create a board with only the 'New' issues as the prioritisation board to determine what should go into 'To Do'.

Create a Kanban board and using a backlog so that the 'New' issues that aren't selected/prioritised to a 'To Do' status don't show on the (To Do, In Progress, Done) board.

How to do that you ask?

It's possible to create new issue statuses in the workflow section, then when constructing your board you choose whether to assign or not assign those statuses to show up on the board under the 'To do', 'In Progress' or 'Done' columns.

For example you can choose NOT to display 'New' issues on the board, only those that have been transitioned to the 'To Do' status.

Also boards do allow you to create multiple columns to support the desire to break 'To Do' into smaller portions of 'To Do', for example 'In development', 'In code review', 'Ready for Test', 'Ready for Release' can all be a 'To Do' status if you create them as a workflow status, you can then create columns in a board using those statuses, they are all 'In Progress' type statuses.

Yes there are workarounds. We already recognise this. Doesn't it seem odd to you however, that the To-Do status doesn't belong to the To-Do category in the scheme proposed. I'd call that a smell.

As a side note, the fact that people are searching for how to achieve this objective at all, rather than why it is missing is yet another indication of the incredibly poor UI affordability of recent versions of Jira. I've been a Jira user since the first release in 2002 and I still waste time trying to figure out how to accomplish what should be simple configuration tasks. It sure makes it hard to sell this tool as a contractor to a new management team every few months.

I am with you that Jira leaves many things to be desired, however Ifind this set of status categories pretty comprehensive: Each item in any workflow I can imagine is either waiting to be processed (To-Do), being worked on, or finished. I really can't imagine a fourth status category. Atlassian may be doing a poor job explaining this, but the concept is sound.

It's actually quite simple:

• any pull-system relies on work being organised in a series of buffer stages (to-do) and work stages (in progress)
• work in that context means anything that changes the state of an item
• an item is only ever done at the end of that process (e.g. when it is completed, or when we decide we won't fix or implement that thing). Before that, when ones step has been completed, it is waiting for the next step (i.e. To-do, just for someone else)

Bringin all this together: When you have a new item, the work required to move it to the next stage might be to categorize, prioritize or describe the item in more detail. In such a workflow a new item is waiting to be categorized, prioritized or described, it other words, new items are of the category To-do.

Community Leader

The problem is some people think differently. Atlassian is in the category that says done means 'we are done processing this issue' whether the final resolution is resolved* or won't do. Other people (I'm one of them) don't like the idea of a task being in the done category if the task wasn't worked on at all (resolution = won't do). An example would be my teenage son saying his chores aredone when what he has really decided is that hewon't do them. That wouldn't and doesn't fly with me =)

A better name would have beenclosed if you really wanted to stick with the 3 category approach, but allowing people to create categories would be better. Since it can't be changed currently, this just falls under one of those 'oh, this is how I have to think now' situations. It's a pain, but when I report, I look for things in thedone category and then I have to break those issues into resolutions--resolved vs notresolved.

* we changed ourdone resolution toresolved to avoid confusion with thedonestatus category. Of course now we have a problem withresolved also being the the date aresolution was set =)