Workflow Discovery

Workflow Discovery draws the workflow your issues actually follow, reconstructed from their recorded history rather than from the workflow configured in Jira. Jira records every status change; Workflow Discovery assembles those changes into one map per project and time window, so you can compare the routes work took with the routes your workflow defines.

It is also where you set up how statuses are grouped into lanes and how accounts are grouped into roles. Flow Performance reads the same map and lays timing over it; see Flow Performance & Variant Explorer.

Mining a map

Pick a site, a project, optionally an issue type, and a time range (the last 7, 30, 90, 180 or 365 days), then press Mine.

One press of Mine is one analysis: it reads the issue events of that project in the window, replays each issue's status changes into a path, and draws the map from those paths. It runs when you press the button and is kept with the time it ran, so the map is a snapshot rather than a live view.

• Mine again with the same filters reuses the kept analysis. The window's end is rounded up to the next hour, so a window ending now is reused for up to an hour and leaves out events that arrived after it ran. The Source label says whether the map was analyzed just now or reused, and when.
• Re-mine runs a fresh analysis. It is available once every five minutes for the same selection.
• A change to your status or role mapping makes the next Mine run a fresh analysis.

Reading the map

• Circles are states. A state is the lane an issue's status is grouped into, together with the issue type and whether the issue had an assignee, a resolution, fix versions or linked commits at that point. So one lane can hold more than one circle. Circles are drawn larger the more often issues visited them.
• Boxes are moves. Each box between two circles is a move issues made between those states, colored by the role that most often makes it.
• Arrows carry no measure. Every arrow is drawn in one gray at one width; on this page neither color nor width encodes time or volume. Flow Performance shades the same moves by how long work waited before them.
• Lanes. Inbox, To Investigate, Investigated, To Do, In Progress, In Test, Done and Rejected. Every status you have not grouped into a lane shares one gray state outside the lanes, so grouping those statuses can reveal moves the map does not show yet.

A direct path that skips a step your configured workflow includes is a route work actually takes; a reviewer could ask whether it is a routine workaround. A map that matches your configured workflow shows the recorded transitions follow it.

The rare-path filter and the counts under the map

The Filter threshold (1 to 20 percent, 5 by default) drops issues whose end-to-end route is rarer than that share of the issues that produced a path, before the map is drawn. A higher threshold gives a leaner map; a lower one keeps minority routes.

The line under the map accounts for every issue with activity in the window:

• on the map: issues whose route survived the filter;
• never changed state: issues with no move from one state to another in the window, including issues whose only status changes stayed inside one state;
• dropped by the rare-path filter: issues whose route was rarer than the threshold.

Those three add up to the issues considered, so the map does not have to hold every issue in the project. The path-shape figure counts the distinct routes seen before filtering, with the number kept beside it.

If one state would have more than twelve distinct moves out of it, the selection is too varied for one map; narrow the time range or pick one issue type and mine again.

Account type and role

These are two different things.

• Account type is what Jira reports for an account: a person, an app, a service-desk customer, or no type. MetaFrazo reads it; it is not inferred.
• Role (engineer, product owner, bot, SQA, architect, support manager, or unknown) comes from your organization's role mapping. An account Jira records as an app takes the bot role unless your mapping gives it another; any other account you have not mapped shows as unknown.

An action Jira records under a person's account is that person's, even when a tool acted on their behalf: the map cannot tell the two apart.

Setting up lanes and roles

Common status names such as Backlog, Open, In Progress and Done start out grouped into lanes. When the map has statuses or accounts you have not grouped, two cards appear under the map:

• Suggest mappings proposes a lane for each ungrouped status.
• Suggest roles proposes a role for each account without one, from how the account behaves rather than from its identity. It never proposes the bot role.

Nothing is saved until you apply a suggestion. Mappings lists the groupings in force. When everything is grouped, the cards say so and offer nothing to run.

Ask the AI and export

The Analyze cards (Bottlenecks, Rework loops and Workflow Report) and the Ask Workflow box summarize and answer questions about the map in plain language, through your organization's AI provider. Export PDF opens your browser's print dialog for the page; choose "Save as PDF" as the destination.

The map's Description tab and its visual reference carry the same rules in full.