We’re in a regulated industry where defect workflows need full audit trails for compliance reviews. Our auditors want evidence that every critical defect was reviewed, approved for fix, tested, and verified before deployment. The tension is between satisfying these audit requirements and not burdening developers with excessive workflow steps and mandatory fields that slow down defect resolution.
How are other teams designing workflows that meet audit control objectives without creating developer friction? Are you using Jira’s history and change logs as evidence, or do you add explicit approval steps? Do you differentiate flows by severity or risk level? Curious whether teams rely on reports to demonstrate compliance or if you’re forced to add workflow overhead.
We had similar pushback initially. We addressed it by making the approval step asynchronous-developers move the bug to “Pending Approval” status and continue working on the next task. The tech lead approves in batch twice daily rather than blocking the developer. This eliminates wait time while preserving the audit trail that someone with authority reviewed the fix approach before code merge.
We use different workflows for critical versus non-critical defects. Critical bugs have mandatory review and approval transitions with required comments explaining the fix approach. Lower severity bugs use a streamlined workflow with optional fields. This keeps the overhead focused where auditors care most.
Do your developers resist the extra steps on critical bugs? We tried this but got pushback that the approval transitions added 24-48 hours to resolution time.
That linked test execution pattern is interesting. Do you require the link before allowing the bug to move to “Closed” status, or is it just recommended practice?