Configuring your workflow

This page is relevant to two specific loading options:

  • Load a Project

  • Load a Filter

It is not applicable to

  • Load a Board

  • Load Jira Issues

Many charts need to consider the process that the work moves through and the order of steps in that process in order to properly portray your data and make it meaningful. In this way, it is very similar to configuring a Jira board. You have to define a left to right flow of activities (columns) and then you must map your Jira workflow statuses to the desired column.




How ActionableAgile for Jira gathers workflow steps for your configuration screen

ActionableAgile looks at every issue in your data selection and every workflow status that they have been through - even if they are not currently used in your workflow. It takes that collective list of Jira workflow statuses it finds, creates a column for each, and assigns each status to its related column.



Unused Jira Worfklow States

If workflow states exist but have never been used by any issue in your data set, the unused workflow states will not appear in your configuration and will have to be added later if needed.

 


Configuring the workflow for your ActionableAgile charts

The default display is rarely what you want in your charts. You most certainly will want to reorder them and condense multiple columns, combining workflow states under fewer headings. You may even want to remove certain columns/Jira workflow statuses altogether. You can do all of these things in the workflow configuration dialog box.

To reorder columns, just drag and drop columns left or right.

To rename columns, click on the pencil icon next to the name you'd like to change. Note that you can only change column headers, not Jira workflow status names. Only the column names are visible to users within ActionableAgile.

To move a Jira workflow status to a different column, just drag the green card from the original column and drop it in the desired column. You can have more than one Jira workflow status mapped to a column.

To delete unneeded columns, click the  icon in the blue header of the column you wish to delete.

To remove a Jira workflow status from being shown in ActionableAgile charts, click the  icon in the top right of the green card representing the desired Jira workflow status.

Consider this before removing Jira workflow statuses

If you have unmapped workflow statuses then you may experience confusion when comparing numbers in Jira to numbers in ActionableAgile. We have seen this issue in relation to the cumulative flow diagrams for some of our customers - a support request will come in with a discrepancy between the number of items they are seeing in their board or query in Jira and the number of items in a workflow state in the CFD. Often the issue is that one of the workflow statuses was not mapped in ActionableAgile. 

Sometimes having unmapped statuses may be desired, but make sure you consider the impact during workflow mapping.




What if I make a mistake in the workflow mapping and I need to redo it?

To clear your configuration, navigate to the Gear icon in the top right of the app, click on it to see a dropdown and click on the link "Clear Local Storage" (or the link may say "Clear Browser Storage").

You won't get any message after you click the link but it will have done its work. Now you reload the Jira project or filter you want to remap and you'll be able to remap your Jira workflow states to ActionableAgile workflow stages.

Please note that this will clear configurations for your entire ActionableAgile data set and you'll need to remap for each dataset when you use it next.