by Matt Doar (@mdoar)
How could a JIRA issue get into a status that has no transitions to it?
This was the puzzle that met our intrepid JIRA consultant at a large ServiceRocket customer recently. The day had started out sunny California-style, but his mood soon turned sour when the distressed user approached him.
"Help, my issue is stuck!" she cried, wringing her hands.
"Don't worry, ma'am," our intrepid protagonist replied, "there's isn't much we can't do with JIRA here at ServiceRocket, and there's not much we haven't seen".
But as he cast his eye over the issue, and then stared at its workflow, he turned a sickly shade of pale. How could this be? There was the issue with a snappy little status of Blocked. But the workflow had no way you could get to that lonely status, because ... all the transitions had been removed!
Getting a grip on his nerves, he checked again, and looked at the Issue History tab. Sure enough, the status really had been changed to Blocked. But how? It was beginning to feel like a locked room mystery. And he didn't even read mysteries.
Had the workflow changed recently? No, it was years since those transitions to Blocked had been removed. Had a different workflow been used for a while? No, the audit log didn't show any changes to the project workflow scheme. What could it be?
Racking his brain, his eyes caught sight of the entry above the changed status in the Issue History tab. "Moved" it said. Moved from a different project. Great galloping ghosts! Moved from a different project that had a workflow with a status of Blocked! A workflow where Blocked was still connected to the rest of the statuses, not all alone as it was in the current workflow.
He had cracked this mystery. Moving the issue from another project, there was no need to change the status because both workflows had a status named Blocked. But in one workflow, it was a dead-end status. No way in, and no way out.
From that day forth, he swore he would remove unused statuses from his workflows. No more stuck issues, or locked rooms, for his users!
