Are there any third party workflow design tools?

[Rob Horan]

Designing a workflow in JIRA can be difficult. A workflow creation tool would be nice.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not really.  I've used the text one for <mumble> years (JIRA 2), and I'm happy with it, but that's just because I'm so familiar with it. 

I'd agree that a visual approach is far better, and the diagram designer does quite a good job for most people I work with - an obvious question becomes "what would you improve about the workflow designer"?

[Rob Horan]

What would I improve? 1) Performance - it moves like a narcoleptic snail going uphill through molasses. 2) Allow full screen editing. 3) Offer export and import between June ra and Visio

[Rob Horan]

Apparently my phone thinks Jira is June Ra

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Mine translated it to a bad word until I worked out how to hack the dictionary. My fault, I really shouldn't swear so much in my text messages! ;-) 1. I don't have an issue with the performance of it on the systems I'm using. It's a little slow to open sometimes, but that's about it 2. There's a full-screen button at the top right of the window 3. Would not be useful - Visio can't handle anything other than the flow-chart view, it's no better than a screenshot. Export I can see for documentation, but importing from Visio is useless, it's far faster to do it directly in JIRA On the points on the other answer - I quite like the "pop new window" for transitions. It means I can keep my workflow open and open up many things if I need to change them. - You can share transitions to save having to create them over and over, but you have to do it in the designer - I'd like to see a "copy transition" as well

[Rob Horan]

I tried opening the GUI designer in Firefox - it uses Flash??

[Rob Horan]

As for full screen, maybe in later versions, but not 6.0.8

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, you need an upgrade to get the full screen, ok. It was quite recent.

[Rob Horan]

Thanks for all your help! Yeah, unfortunately upgrades are not the easiest things to do.

[Rob Horan]

Well, the upgrade itself is easy. Prepping for it is more difficult.

[Sam Huawey]

Sorry for the question, but why do you think that workflow editing in JIRA is difficult?

I use built-in table-based editor (not the graphics-based) and think that it is pretty easy.

However, if you still need another creation tool, you can export a standard workflow into xml and edit it in say notepad or any other text editor.

[Rob Horan]

Difficult is probably the wrong word. Frustrating is better. Like many other admin functions in Jira, every action loads a new screen.I would love to use the graphic editor but there is almost no working room, and it just seems slow, and unresponsive. I'd need to zoom out to a point where I can't see anything because only half (or less) of my vertical space is available. So I work with text, but that has its own issues, not to mention how every time I create a new transition it gets its own ID. If I want to use "Send to QC" 3 times with customizations (screen, validators, etc) I have to repeat the customizations each time, rather than being able to reuse the same transition. I say this because the built in workflows use the same "Resolve" transition ID several times. One customization fixes it in all places.