• Article
  • May.14.2019

How to move issues back to a previous status in Jira workflows

  • May.14.2019
  • Reading time mins

When working on Jira workflows, people often ask if it’s possible to transition an issue back to its previous status. Some use cases could be that they need to put the issue on standby status, or that they need more information about an issue before starting a process.

In the following example you’ll see how to set up an ‘On Hold’ status for issues in Jira, and how to transition an issue a step back in the workflow.

For this trick, you’ll need to install the Jira Misc Worklows Extensions add-on.

How to update the workflow status in Jira: Build your workflow

  • Create a global transition to the ‘On Hold’ status
  • Create a transition from the ‘On Hold’ status to every other status you want to come back to
Since the transition names cannot be the same, just add a blank space at the end of it.

How to update the workflow status in Jira: Add conditions to transitions

Since you don’t need to transition from the ‘On Hold’ and ‘Done’ to ‘On Hold’ status, we will hide them. To do this, add the value field condition on the global transition to the ‘On Hold’ status:

On each ‘Back to previous status’ transition, add the Previous Status condition, selecting the correct status in the options. For example, on the transition from ‘On Hold’ to ‘In Progress’:

How to update the workflow status in Jira: The result

My issue is in the ‘Open’ state: I can either start progress or put it on hold:

 

My issue is in the ‘On Hold’ state: I can only go back to the previous step:

 

And that’s it – how move issues back to a previous status in Jira workflows! If you have any questions or comments on this topic or anything else Jira related, leave a comment below or get in touch with one of our certified Atlassian consultants.

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