| I was previously a JIRA admin, and what I very quickly found was making the workflows the least restrictive possible was the most effective. JIRA itself is quite feature rich and that can be abused, but using it to make your configuration relatively "dumb" makes the actual user experience a lot better. I very actively pushed back on any requests to add additional states, but nonetheless there were several of them though mainly to facilitate kanban columns and way our dev and QA people worked together. I think the biggest thing is I ended up adding a ton of transitions between workflow states. Eg: "QA in progress" straight to "Dev in progress" was allowed, as was pretty much any state to "Closed" (so long as resolution was wontfix/invalid/etc). It took lots of time to get that setup properly and ensure transition states had the right name (so the button in the UI had a logical label), but it was well worth it. The only real workflow restriction we had was that to set an item to "closed" with status="resolved" it had to have a fixVersion assigned. This was a trivial thing to deal with day-to-day but made the list of closed tickets immeasurably better (eg, building release notes, or tracking down what versions a bug affects based on when the feature causing it was originally introduced). Comparatively, I've used JIRA in a massively locked-down state -- where there are tons of required fields, very prescriptive workflow that often requires 3-6 transitions to get from one state to another, specific roles required to do transitions -- and it sucks. It makes the ticket content and statuses worse (not better) simply because everyone hates using it. If people aren't following the team's process (such as devs clicking "QA passed" without doing QA), that's a people problem, and it isn't going to be solved in the JIRA workflow editor. |