What is the difference between a "Step" and a "Status"?

[William Ruiz]

Working within Jira Process Management/Workflows/Text 
There are essentially 3 different sequential line items: 

1. Statuses: a state of an issue

2. Transition: a process to change the status of an issue or a control point

??? 3. Steps... it appears that a Step is similar to a Status. But what differentiates it?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

A "step" is a structural point in a workflow.  The other structural thing in a workflow is a transition.  Steps are points, transitions join steps together.

Steps have a 1:1 unique (within the workflow) relationship with status.   Status, despite looking like one of the most important things in Jira, is actually irrelevant.  You could, if you wanted, throw status away, and work off steps.  (Don't try, it's ugly)

This is quite a neat trick in some ways - it lets you describe a process with steps and transitions without having to present it to your people as a fixed thing.  It gives us a level of abstraction that looks a little more complicated than it might be, but actually vastly simplifies workflow maintenance.  Indirectly, it also simplifies reporting, automation, classification and and and...

Main point here though is only admins care about steps.  And not a lot, because we see them as having that 1:1 status relationship, which makes it ok to think in status alone!  (And the diagram editor pretty much hides steps on that basis too, so even less to think about)

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @William Ruiz ,

for all intents and purpose you can ignore Steps completely, Certainly from a user perspective that is. Steps are really more like a framework that the rest of the workflow (transitions and statuses) are associated with. They are, as I understand it, used internally by the Atlassian software when it comes to renaming of statuses. If you’re editing in the diagram mode you really never even see the step  terminology. I hope that helps.

[William Ruiz]

Nice @Jack Brickey  thank you. 
In that case, my inability to compare them makes sense. 

But I like that idea of using "steps" to label a change in project Phase within my process.

Step: Planning 

Step: Execution