Visualising JIRA Workflows

Description/Features

One of JIRA's shortcomings is its inability to produce any sort of diagram of the workflows. Looking at the text representation of a workflow is not particularly enlightening:

There are several possibilities here... firstly, it's an issue Atlassian is clearly aware of, they blog about it here - however, I'm too impatient to wait for this addition. Secondly, there is a beta version of a GUI tool for editing OSWorkflows, but I haven't had much luck with that, it's a bit fiddly and too much of a faff for end users to have to import an XML file in to the tool.

Having had some experience with GraphViz I wrote a JIRA report plugin to display an SVG digraph of the workflow.

That's a lot better. I can think of a few improvements I'd like to make at some point:

1. Show any transition screen on the workflow actions.
2. Show any conditions, eg user must be in role/group.

Problem with these is you only get identifiers in the XML, not screen names, so would need a bit more grepping around in the database.

Installation

1. Download and install GraphViz.
2. Install the plugin by copying the JAR to WEB-INF/lib inside your JIRA web application.
3. Edit CODEGEIST:the properties file, choose SVG or PNG (SVG recommended), and specify the path to dot(.exe). Copy the properties file to somewhere in the classpath, typically WEB-INF/classes.
4. If you have chosen SVG, and your browser requires it, download and install the SVG viewer from http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html. If you are not sure if you need it visit the test page.
5. Restart JIRA

You should see a new report called Workflow Report on the Browse Project page, for every project.

Note that this makes workflows available for viewing that users might not otherwise actually have access to. Personally this doesn't bother me, I want people to see all workflows in use because it might encourage people to use an existing one rather than asking for a new one to be created.

Customising

If you want to customise the output for a single workflow, set the property keepDotFiles = true, modify the generated .dot file, and run it through GraphViz, eg

dot -Tsvg -o output.svg plot-29645.dot

If you want to make permanent changes, extract the .xsl file and edit. You will want to download a sample XML workflow from jira to work with. AFAIK, you can put the XSLT file somewhere in the classpath at the right package, /com/atlassian/jira/web/action/workflow.xsl, then you should be able to edit and then refresh the page to see your changes.