When it comes to JIRA Administration, one can get all sorts of questions that are obvious to the JIRA administrator, but not so obvious to the end user. Does this conversation sound familiar?

User: Why can't I revert my TPS report workflow back to the 'Innovating' status?

JIRA Admin: You can, that transition is located under the "Workflow" dropdown.

User: The what?

JIRA Admin: The drop-down list labeled "Workflow" next to your other transition buttons. The option to Re-Innovate is in there.

User: Oh, okay. Weird. Thanks.

The JIRA Administrator can answer these questions every day, create an FAQ that no one reads, or change the interface so people do not have to ask the question in the first place. Fortunately, JIRA is that configurable, if you know what you are doing.

Making Workflow Transition Buttons More Accessible

Not everyone is a fan of the "Workflow" drop-down button in JIRA. This is the drop-down list that appears when you have more than two transitions available to you under default settings in JIRA. Some folks like the way that it frees up real estate on their screen. Others would like to see all of the transitions available to them without having to use a drop-down button. For those in the latter camp, the good news is that you can edit the number of workflow transition buttons visible outside of the "Workflow" drop-down in JIRA. The bad news is that you can't perform this edit through the GUI.

Rather than walk you through all of the steps, we've put together a tutorial on how to edit your workflow transition buttons. We've also made a second part to this tutorial, that shows you how to reorder your workflow transition buttons.

For reference:

The file you'll want to create in your JIRA Home directory is: jira-config.properties

The property key you'll want to introduce is called: ops.bar.group.size.opsbar-transitions