Configuring Jira Agile columns for NotStarted, InProgress and Done

David Keaveny October 2, 2013

I am using a custom workflow with Jira Agile 6.3.1. I have a total of 11 columns with the appropriate statuses mapped out, as shown below.

How can I configure the colour coding of the columns? The red-yellow-green is reflected as a summary on the sprint planning view, but currently this means that an issue will only be marked as done when it is released into production, not when it has passed testing and is ready for release. This means that the red-yellow-green status is next to useless, as almost every ticket will be In Progress (see below):

In this case, we are one day away from the end of our sprint, and nearly every issue has passed testing and is ready for release, which in our book counts as done - but Jira Agile doesn't agree!

4 answers

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5 votes
Answer accepted
Deleted user January 12, 2014

Unfortunately, based on my research, the answer is "Don't use JIRA Agile that way."

I am struggling with the same problem, and I'm about to just give up and split it into two boards, one a Scrum board that marks an issue as "Done" when it's passed to QA, and a second Kanban board that tracks the issues through the promotion environments. That way you can at least measure burn-down at the point where developers are done with it, even if it doesn't really mean ultimately that the issue itself is "done" (i.e. through QA and deployed).

Seems trivial to make columns assignable for purposes of estimation, but given it took 2 months for anyone to even so much as acknowledge your question I guess I shouldn't be surprised if this never makes the cut.

Julio Ramirez October 13, 2014

We will be using two boards as well. Thanks for the idea Curtis!

5 votes
Gordon March 11, 2014

+1 - this seems like a pretty obvious requirement given the flexibility of configuring the scrum board. I cant believe many teams use just 3 columns in real life, and mandating that all but the first and last columns are "in progress" (yellow) renders the colouring (and the potentially very useful summaries on the plan page etc) utterly useless.

David Keaveny March 27, 2014

It's a shame that they don't use the Resolution field to check for completion - if it's unresolved and in the Open (or initial) state, it must be Not Started, if it's unresolved and not in the Open state, then it must be In Progress; if it has a resolution (fixed, won't fix, or whatever) then it can be considered Done regardless of its current state.

Mike Sorensen
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April 10, 2014

We couldn't do that (use Resolution for Done) because we have a Review state. Once an issue is worked on, it gets a Resolution. Next it is reviewed by the team and if it passes it goes to Done. If it fails the first check, it goes back to the fixer for more work - all within the same sprint cycle.

Julio Ramirez October 13, 2014

Please, let people decide on such a simple thing like having several "Done" statuses, even if it is not orthodox. Anyone filed a request for this already?

1 vote
SSO April 10, 2014

hello, there's also the problem about the checkbox attached to a status : this checkbox is supposed to be ticked and set the Resolution field to Done when an issue is transitioned to this status. It apparently does set the issue's Resolution field to Done, but when you close your sprint, if your status is NOT in the green column at the left, then your issue is not considered really done. And you get the alert about issues not completed.

However, if your status is in the green column, then even if the checkbox is NOT ticked, all the issues which are in this status are considered completed in the sprint (burndown chart OK, no alert when you close the sprint...)

It seems that JIRA Agile considers issues are completed when they are in the green column, regardless of the Resolution field state.

In my humble opinion, it looks like a bug.

SSO April 17, 2014

hello,

Am I the only one who finds it weird that statuses MUST be in the last column to be considered Done, regardless of the Resolution checkbox being ticked or not ?

0 votes
David Keaveny November 19, 2013

Bump - does anyone have a solution?

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