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  1. Jira Cloud
  2. JSWCLOUD-18939

In Configure Board, allow multiple "To do" (Grey) and "Done" (Green) columns (company-managed)

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      Problem Definition

      As a configurer of an Agile board, similar to how I can configure my custom issue statuses to belong to one of the three options, I would also like to configure the columns on my agile board to be:

      • To do
        - In Progress
      • Done

      Currently, the automatic assumption is that the very left column is To Do and the very right column is Done.

      This is a huge limitation in Jira Agile and causes problems especially with rendering the burndown chart.

      I do not believe that asking the user to merge multiple of my columns into one or to create a separate Agile board is a sufficient solution for the issue.

      Suggested Solution

      Allow the ability to add additional columns to also represent To do and Done in addition to the ability to already add an In Progress column.

      Note

      Judging from the comments on GHS-10261 and GHS-11355 as well as this post on Atlassian Answers, I do feel that this is a feature of general interest.

      Please stop closing every suggestion about this as "Answered" and leave any one of these three open for us to vote on.

      Note: I am explicitly filing a duplicate of GHS-10261 and GHS-11355, both of which I find to have been closed prematurely.

            [JSWCLOUD-18939] In Configure Board, allow multiple "To do" (Grey) and "Done" (Green) columns (company-managed)

            Patrick Wright added a comment - - edited

            I was trying to figure out why, in our "sprint health" dialog, it said there were 0% of items not started even though I could see a bunch of issues not started.  I then discovered, to my dismay, that Jira seems to make the assumption that only the left-most column is "not started" regardless of the actual "type" of the workflow states in that column.

            We have the following workflow states:

            • Open
            • Ready to Start
            • In Progress
            • Done

            Where Open and Ready to Start are marked as "to do" types (grey).

            I thought I could "work around" this problem by simply adding Open and Ready to Start to the same column but, as seen in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-11639, Jira does not allow you to drag an issue to the same column so this won't work.

            Patrick Wright added a comment - - edited I was trying to figure out why, in our "sprint health" dialog, it said there were 0% of items not started even though I could see a bunch of issues not started.  I then discovered, to my dismay, that Jira seems to make the assumption that only the left-most column is "not started" regardless of the actual "type" of the workflow states in that column. We have the following workflow states: Open Ready to Start In Progress Done Where Open and Ready to Start are marked as "to do" types (grey). I thought I could "work around" this problem by simply adding Open and Ready to Start to the same column but, as seen in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-11639 , Jira does not allow you to drag an issue to the same column so this won't work.

            Any news on here? Really needed feature, especially for using the reports (e.g. burndown chart)

            Daniel Khan (Peak _amp_ Peak) added a comment - Any news on here? Really needed feature, especially for using the reports (e.g. burndown chart)

            I look forward to have this new feature.

            Indeed, we put cards in "done" status only after "go live" : 

            • you have a better visibility of what must be in the release for production
            • once your card is in done status you can't modifiy anything else

            Having multiple colonnes in "done" status will allow to have a real burndown, without that reporting are useless

             

            Or another possibilty is : being able to set alone your burndown, and choose the column which must be taken for the burdown report

            Sophie Vergnères added a comment - I look forward to have this new feature. Indeed, we put cards in "done" status only after "go live" :  you have a better visibility of what must be in the release for production once your card is in done status you can't modifiy anything else Having multiple colonnes in "done" status will allow to have a real burndown, without that reporting are useless   Or another possibilty is : being able to set alone your burndown, and choose the column which must be taken for the burdown report

            Atlassian approach to determining column category To Do | In Progress | Done is documented in this article: Configure columns _ Jira Software Cloud _ Atlassian Support and more specifically the following section (note the colours mentioned in this documentation are out of date, but the other principles still apply currently):

            Each column has a blue, yellow, or green color, as shown in the screenshot above.

            • The single left-most column will always be blue, representing items in 'new' state (as per our design guidelines).
            • The single right-most column will always be green, representing items in a 'successful' state.
            • The middle column (or columns if you add more) are always yellow, representing items in progress.

            You will see these colors shown in a number of places in Jira Software, e.g. in gadgets for Jira applications.

            The problem is that this approach is inconsistent with the rest of Jira application, which uses status categories that are assigned to each status to group statuses into one of To Do | In Progress | Done. This approach to grouping statuses (based on status categories) is seen throughout Jira application, and below are some examples of where you might see this:

            • Release progress bar on Releases screen
            • Epic progress bar on Epic details screen
            • Gadgets showing issue progress

            In all these cases status category is used to determine relative progress of an issue, except for Jira board columns, which totally disregards the status category of statuses contained in the column and instead assumes that 1st column is always To Do, all middle columns are In Progress and the final column is always Done, thus not allowing possibility of having multiple To Do or Done columns. This may have seemed like a reasonable assumption to someone at the time of designing board columns, but it causes problems downstream, for instance if I have a board with following columns, I'd expect the columns to categorised according to colours as shown below:

            • To Do
            • Selected for Development
            • In Progress
            • Test
            • Rejected
            • Done

            But unfortunately, due to the current design flaw, the columns are categorised as follows

            • To Do
            • Selected for Development
            • In Progress
            • Test
            • Rejected
            • Done

            At first sight this might just seem like a semantic issue, but on further investigation we found that column status categories, are also used to render story points statistics / progress in a backlog of a scrum board and would show incorrect stats in such case. There are probably other areas (burn-down charts etc) where this has an affect.

            I hope that Atlassian will take this information on board and adjust board column configuration to use contained status categories for determining column category and/or allow users to control column categorisation.

            Ivan Shtanichev added a comment - Atlassian approach to determining column category To Do  | In Progress | Done   is documented in this article:  Configure columns _ Jira Software Cloud _ Atlassian Support  and more specifically the following section (note the colours mentioned in this documentation are out of date, but the other principles still apply currently): Each column has a blue, yellow, or green color, as shown in the screenshot above. The single left-most column will always be blue, representing items in 'new' state (as per our  design guidelines ). The single right-most column will always be green, representing items in a 'successful' state. The middle column (or columns if you add more) are always yellow, representing items in progress. You will see these colors shown in a number of places in Jira Software, e.g. in  gadgets for Jira applications . The problem is that this approach is inconsistent with the rest of Jira application, which uses status categories that are assigned to each status to group statuses into one of  To Do  | In Progress | Done . This approach to grouping statuses (based on status categories) is seen throughout Jira application, and below are some examples of where you might see this: Release progress bar on Releases screen Epic progress bar on Epic details screen Gadgets showing issue progress In all these cases status category is used to determine relative progress of an issue, except for Jira board columns, which totally disregards the status category of statuses contained in the column and instead assumes that 1st column is always To Do, all middle columns are In Progress and the final column is always Done, thus not allowing possibility of having multiple To Do or Done columns. This may have seemed like a reasonable assumption to someone at the time of designing board columns, but it causes problems downstream, for instance if I have a board with following columns, I'd expect the columns to categorised according to colours as shown below: To Do Selected for Development In Progress Test Rejected Done But unfortunately, due to the current design flaw, the columns are categorised as follows To Do Selected for Development In Progress Test Rejected Done At first sight this might just seem like a semantic issue, but on further investigation we found that column status categories, are also used to render story points statistics / progress in a backlog of a scrum board and would show incorrect stats in such case. There are probably other areas (burn-down charts etc) where this has an affect. I hope that Atlassian will take this information on board and adjust board column configuration to use contained status categories for determining column category and/or allow users to control column categorisation.

              Unassigned Unassigned
              800bba3d9493 Tim Bodeit
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                Created:
                Updated: