Before you begin

Before you can transition issues to columns on a board, your Jira administrator or board administrator will have already mapped workflow statuses to your board's columns. To know more about configuring these mappings, see Configuring columns.

Also, you can only transition an issue if you have project permission to move that issue to the status in the Jira workflow to which the column is mapped.

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 will respect your workflow configuration, and will trigger all your workflow validations, conditions, functions, and notifications when you transition issues (See Workflows for more information.) However, note that boards currently don't auto-assign issues to you.

On this page:

Related pages:

Transition an open issue

If you have an issue open already, you can transition it by clicking on the current status and choosing a new status or transition. You can see the issue workflow by clicking View workflow.

You can't make changes to the issue workflow. You need to log in as a user with the Administer Jira global permission to access and manage workflows. For more information, see Working with workflows.


Transition linked issues and subtasks

If the issue you're working on has subtasks or linked issues, you can transition them without having to leave the issue you're viewing. Click the status of a linked issue or subtask and choose the relevant status or transition.

Transition on a board

  1. Click the Jira icon > Projects > then select the relevant project.
  2. In the Active sprints (Scrum projects) or on the Kanban board (Kanban projects), transition an issue by dragging and dropping the issue from one column to another.
    When you start dragging an issue, you can only transition the issue to columns whose backgrounds turn blue. When the issue is hovered over the target column, the blue background turns green.

  3. If a dialog box opens for your workflow transition status, complete all mandatory fields (indicated by a red asterisk) before submitting the form.

If the target column is associated with more than one status, when you hover the issue over that column, each possible transition will appear as a separate section with a dashed outline. Complete the transition to the appropriate status by dropping the issue onto the section of the column.

Transition multiple issues

Depending on the following conditions, you can press the Shift or Ctrl key to select and transition multiple issues from the backlog to the next status in your project's workflow:

Transition issues with subtasks in the Kanban backlog

  • To transition both the parent issue and its subtasks, drag and drop the parent issue while it's collapsed to the corresponding section.
  • To transition just the parent issue or a subtask, expand the parent issue first, then drag and drop only the parent issue or the sub-task to the corresponding section.

  • If all subtasks of an issue have been completed, you need to resolve the parent issue itself. When you move the last subtask to the Done column, 

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     will prompt you to move the parent issue as well. If you resolved the subtasks in native 

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     instead, a button will be displayed on the parent issue the next time you visit the Active sprints page.