Consider the use case of wanting to filter out "done" issues from logging time.
Some jira installations have a plethora of statuses, to cater for many different type of projects. this inevitably leads to a very log list of statuses to filter by.
It would be great to be able to filter by status category (as defined in jira global settings). this summarises/groups the statuses. and this would aid the filtering in logging time.
Nicholas Tsiroyiannis
| Tempo Products | Tempo Timesheets |
| Tempo Platform | Cloud |
In Tempo Timesheets, the Configure Issue Picker has some great features for filtering to help find Jira Issues to log time against.
Currently, "Status" is one of the filter types offered. While slightly handy, it's also very often very inconvenient to work with. I'll cover the many problems with a Status filter later.
What Tempo should implement is support for "StatusCategory" instead. Jira has supported this field for a very long time now. It is standard on ALL Jira issues, and there are only three values: "To Do", "In Progress" and "Done". All Status values are always mapped to one of those three StatusCategory values.
Offering StatusCategory is a MUCH easier way to approach the desired functionality in the Configure Issue Picker. In fact, a good default would be to select "To Do" and "In Progress" and leave "Done" unselected.
I consider it a substantial gap in Tempo functionality to have omitted support for this longstanding feature of all Jira issues.
I recommend keeping support for the Status field, as there are situations that StatusCategory alone cannot support. But most users would appreciate the simplicity of configuration that using StatusCategory provides.
Note that the documentation should suggest that users select at most one (Status OR StatusCategory) to be a Visible filter. Enabling both filters at the same time might not be optimal.
Better yet, change the "Status" filter configuration to ask the user to select either "Status" values or "StatusCategory" values. That will avoid having an extra-wide filter button that says "StatusCategory". I'm attaching a screenshot mock-up showing what that might look like.
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Now let's look at all the problems with forcing users to only use "Status" for a filter.
One immediately evident problem is that most mature Jira instance have many, many status values. In our Cloud instance, 58 status values are listed in the Configure Issue Picker for "Status". Worse, they aren't even sorted! That's a pretty horrible UI/UX experience.
Another concern is that users can be quite isolated from the actual Status values used for the issues in their Jira Projects. Board columns and transition buttons decouple user actions from the actual issue Status values in play. So an everyday Jira user might not even be sure about what Status values to select.
Also, different projects use different status values, depending on their workflows. But even with a Project filter engaged, Tempo doesn't limit the Status values shown to just the status values in the workflows for those projects. Thus, most listed Status values aren't even relevant for the typical user working in just a few projects! But the user has no good way of knowing which ones matter, and which ones don't.
Another very common problem in mature Jira instances is similar sounding (even redundant) Status values. I noticed that ours has both "Canceled" and "Cancelled" as defined status values (an admin prior to me did that). Only one will actually relate to their project - but which one?
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In summary, please enhance the Configure Issue Picker to support StatusCategory. Thank you.