Ability to add more categories to statuses

NOTE: This suggestion is for JIRA Server. Using JIRA Cloud? See the corresponding suggestion.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for voting and commenting on this issue. Your input in the comments helps us understand how your teams work and what you're hoping to accomplish with JIRA.

We have decided to close this specific request for additional status categories as Won't Fix. The finite set of status categories allows us to build useful features on top of them, like completion progress indicators for Epics and Versions.

We recognize that for many teams, most of the steps in a workflow are "In Progress" and that it can be difficult to distinguish them. Here are some strategies:

• Add additional columns to your board for different workflow states. You can have several "In Progress" columns to represent concepts like "In Development" or "Under Review".
• Use the card colors based on JQL queries feature (documentation) to define your own colors for workflow states. I've created this suggestion in the JIRA Agile project to improve this in the future: GHS-11666
• Use JIRA Agile card layouts (new in JIRA Agile 6.6) to show the workflow state on the card (documentation)
• To customize the display of issues within the JIRA issue navigator, consider the free third-party icnavigator add-on from Interconcept GmbH.

We do not plan to support arbitrary colors for status categories. The mapping of blue, yellow, and green to "To Do", "In Progress", and "Done" is part of Atlassian's overall visual system. Our intent is to improve how we use this pattern to communicate information in JIRA; however, we use the combination of colors and lozenges to represent concepts not only in JIRA, but across Atlassian's product suite.

Finally, there were specific requests for a "Red" status color. The main use case here was situations where an issue had progressed to the end of a workflow, but the resolution was negative (e.g. "Failed" instead of "Done"). In JIRA's structure, this connects the final workflow state (i.e. "Resolved") with the type of resolution. While there's certainly merit in this request, it has the potential to significantly increase JIRA's complexity.

I understand that our decision may be disappointing. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dave Meyer
JIRA Product Manager