Workflow Overview

Workflows let you customize and automate the lifecycle of issues in your project. With workflows, you can easily notify teams about events, enforce policies, execute periodic tasks, and support existing business processes.

What's a Workflow?

In YouTrack, a workflow is a set of rules, which can be attached to a project to define a lifecycle for issues in a project.

To create and edit workflows and rules, use the YouTrack Workflow Editor, an MPS-based application designed specifically to develop and upload workflows to your YouTrack server.

When you create a workflow, you can attach it to a project and activate specific rules. A workflow can contain several rules, but you can choose which combination of rules you want to activate in different projects. In situations like these, YouTrack lets you attach a workflow to several projects and enable or disable rules for each project individually.

Workflow Rules

The following types of workflow rules are available:

• Stateless Rule — a simple rule which defines an action to be performed upon a change made for an issue, depending on a condition.
  A sample stateless rule in the Workflow Editor:

  

• Scheduled Rule — a rule to define scheduled events depending on a condition. For example, you can periodically check for issues with specific attribute values and notify a user.
  A sample schedule rule in the Workflow Editor:

  

• State-machine Rule — a rule that defines transitions between issue states. A state here is not only the State field of an issue, but any field of an issue that has defined transitions from one value to another. However, the most obvious and most often used state-machine rule is for transitions between values of the State field. A sample state-machine rule in the Workflow Editor:

  

For more details and sample rules, see Workflow Rules.

Default Workflows

YouTrack provides several default workflows that cover the most general use cases. For example, workflows that automatically assign an issue to a subsystem owner or process duplicate issue.

Many default workflows are auto-attached. These workflows are attached automatically to all new projects.

Custom Workflows

If you need a workflow that supports a specific use case, you can write your own. You can either customize a default workflow to support your use case or create a new workflow.

You can also use or adapt custom workflows that have been uploaded to the Custom Workflow Repository in GitHub