Creating a custom category

[Ketan Shah]

Is it possible to create a custom category?  I know that the system comes out of the box with "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done"

Is it possible to create a category of my choosing?  

[Mikael Sandberg]

The short answer is no, that list is fixed.

[Ketan Shah]

Thank you Mikael.  Appreciate your response. 

[Francisco Mingote]

Hi Mikael, Do you know when are you adding the option to add new Categories? 

Thanks

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Francisco Mingote I do not work for Atlassian, I am just a user of their tools. I did find this request, JRASERVER-63384, and it looks like it will not happen.

We have decided to close this specific request for additional status categories as Won't Fix. The finite set of status categories allows us to build useful features on top of them, like completion progress indicators for Epics and Versions.

[Francisco Mingote]

@Mikael Sandberg thanks a lot to share the final resolution. 

[Benoit]

Blocked and waiting should be part of other category so we can create KPI across the whole company. Please add this new Category... Blocked.

[Jack Brickey]

Maybe I am missing the point here. Not sure what you mean by "category" but "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done" are statuses and you certainly have the ability to create additional statuses via defining workflows.

[Mikael Sandberg]

My reply was in regards to the Status Categories "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done".

[Ketan Shah]

Sorry - Correct Mikael.  That is what I was referring to as well.  

[Jack Brickey]

got it! now i'm aligned. :-)

[Marc Moroz]

Statuses belong to 1 of 3 types of Status Category.  It gets a little confusing because there are Statuses with the same names as the Status Categories.

To Do.

This is work that hasn't started.  You can make more than one status that is of Status Category TO DO.  For example:

• Status of To Do, Status Category of To Do = Work that needs to be started
• Status of Idea, Status Category of To Do = Stories that are being fleshed out to determine if they are worth pursuing.
• Status of Needs Grooming, Status Category of To Do = Stories that need grooming before being accepted into a sprint backlog.

You could even use these three together going from Idea, to Needs Grooming, to To Do with Idea and Needs Grooming happening in the Product Backlog and then being set to To Do when moving into the Sprint Backlog.

In Progress

This shows that work has started.  As has been said, this usually constitutes the majority of steps.  For Example:

• Status of In Development, Status Category of In Progress
• Status of In Testing, Status Category of In Progress
• There is also a Status of In Progress, Status Category of In Progress = can be more generally applied.

Done

Some teams have multiple types of Done.  While I make use of Resolution for that purpose, different teams have different use cases.  For example:

• Status of Done, Status Category of Done = Work is Done as expected
• Status of Rejected, Status Category of Done = A request for work that wasn't accepted.  This could be to show that the requirement was considered but the team and customer decided it wasn't worth doing.
• Status of In Production, Status Category of Done = Could be for teams that want to use Statuses to help easily track environment promotion progress.

Hope that helps