JIRA change of workflow on existing projects

Question

I have created a new workflow in JIRA since the current one I am basing my team to work on, doesn't longer fits our needs. The concern I have is what happens to the previous tickets? do they change at all or are kept as is? will the new tickets that are to be created the only ones to contain the new workflow?

For historical and management reasons, I'd like old tickets to stay as is.

Answer 1

Once you apply the new workflow you'll be asked to tell Jira how to move the issues. You will be asked to choose for each status in the old workflow status a new status in the new workflow, than all the issues will be moved to the new workflow to each new status. beside that, all shared fields will be copied, non-shared ones will be lost.

Answer 2

If you change a workflow for an issue type, then it changes for all issues of that type, be they old or new.

I understand your question in that you want to retain the statuses of old tickets. In general I would only recommend this for tickets in a final state.

That leaves you two options

• keep old statuses in your new workflow - then really nothing changes for them. If you don't provide any incoming transitions for these, you can be sure they are really legacy status. The only downside is that your workflow will be a bit cluttered, depending on how many status you need to keep.
• create new issue types, e.g. Bug (archive), have the old workflow associated with this issue type and move old old tickets to this type. I wouldn't recommend this, since it is a lot of overhead and looks a bit ugly, but it is an option.