What is a Jira workflow?
As stated by Atlassian, “Workflows can be associated with particular projects and, optionally, specific issue types by using a workflow scheme.”
A Jira workflow defines your process and lists all the steps (statuses) that a task goes through – from start to finish. More about statuses later.
Jira Workflows are the behind-the-scenes process of your tasks. From start to finish, they list all the steps that the issue walks through using statuses. So project workflows will allow your issues to move from the backlog to “to do” to “done” and everywhere in between depending on the process you’ve established for your team.
The complexity of the workflow will vary based on your needs and you can use automation to either speed it up or set some ground rules in place (a certain task or subtask can’t be moved to a different columns in Jira unless certain, pre-defined criteria are met).
In addition to that Atlassian offers certain pre-made project templates that come with specific workflows for various teams like service management or DevOps, etc.
Note: Workflows in team-managed and company-managed projects have certain differences. For starters, Project Admins can make changes to workflows in team-managed projects as opposed to Jira Admins. That being said, the workflow scene will be specific to a project so you will not be able to share it across several Jira boards.
In addition to that team-managed projects have certain limitations like the inability to have specific workflows per each issue type.
Moreover, there is a specific difference for Jira Service Management users. Each request type has its own workflow in team-managed projects whereas company-managed projects have workflows that are independent of request types. This means that multiple request types can have the same existing workflow, however every change will affect all of them.
Why do custom workflows matter?
The goal of custom workflows is to create a transparent and visualized process that meets your company’s needs on one Kanban board. It also simplifies communication in an organization and provides an overview of a project’s or sprint’s progress thus helping with sprint capacity planning in Jira.