Manage how work flows in your team-managed space

Workflows represent your team’s process. They control how people progress work, and guide them on how to take a task from start to finish.

What is a workflow?

Two concepts define a workflow in team-managed spaces:

1. Statuses – the steps in your team’s working process that describe the state of a task.

2. Transitions – how a piece of work can move between statuses.

What’s a workflow status?

Statuses help people understand the state of a piece of work. They appear in many views across your Jira site, linked Atlassian products, and third-party apps.

In Jira, your space comes with three default statuses:

• To do

• In progress

• Done

We recommend these for starting a space. As your team progresses, you may need to add more statuses to control the flow of your team’s work.

Statuses can be shared between work types. This allows you to search for and report on work items in the same status across any work type. For example, you can find any work items that are currently “In progress” regardless if they are a story, a bug, or task.

More about creating, editing, and deleting statuses in the workflow editor

What are status categories?

Jira lets you collect many statuses under a to do, in progress, or done category. These categories help you sort, filter, and report on your work. For example, you might have a “Backlog” to do status and a “Waiting for approval” to do status. Or, you might have a “Developing” in progress status and an “In review” in progress status.

More about creating, editing, and deleting statuses in the workflow editor

What are workflow transitions?

Transitions connect statuses and help define the flow of work in your space.

These pathways define how people move pieces of work through your workflow. For example, if you run a pizza shop, you might have different statuses depending on who’s picking up the pizza. Once the pizza is “Ready for pickup”, it can move down the “Send for delivery” transition, putting it in the “On the way” status. Or, it can transition down the “Give to customer” transition, showing that the pizza work is done.

View and edit a work type’s workflow

To view a work type’s workflow:

1. Next to your space's name in the sidebar, select More actions (•••), then Space settings, then Work types.

2. From the sidebar, select the work type you want to know more about.

3. Select Edit workflow.

Save changes to a work type’s workflow

To save a work type’s workflow:

1. When you’re done editing the work type’s workflow, select Update workflow.

2. From the dropdown, deselect lozenges to confirm which work type the workflow will apply to.

3. Select Save.

Resolve conflicts when saving a workflow

Workflow changes might affect work that’s already in flight. Don’t worry too much about conflicts. Jira warns you about any work items that are in statuses you’re deleting and asks you to change their status to a valid one. Keep in mind, prompted changes like these won’t execute any rules. It just updates the work items' statuses.