Jira Workflows

Workflows are one of the core and most powerful features in Jira. They control how issues in Jira move from one stage to another as they are being worked on, sometimes being re-assigned to other users and capturing additional information during the process. For this reason, workflows can be thought of as the life cycle of issues.

Unlike many other systems, Jira allows you to create your own workflows to resemble the work processes you may already have in your organization. This is a good example of how Jira is able to adapt to your needs without you having to change the way you work.

In this chapter, we will learn not only about how to create workflows with the new workflow designer, but also how to use workflow components, such as conditions and validators, to add additional behavior to your workflows. We will also look at the many different apps that are available to expand the possibilities of what you can do with workflows.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Setting up different workflows for your project
• Capturing additional information during workflow transitions
• Using common transitions
• Using global transitions
• Restricting the availability of workflow transitions
• Validating user input in workflow transitions
• Performing additional processing after a transition is executed
• Reacting to events coming from outside of Jira
• Rearranging the workflow transition bar
• Restricting the resolution values in a transition
• Preventing issue updates in selected statuses
• Making a field required during a workflow transition
• Creating custom workflow transition logic