If you sign up to Jira today and start a new project, you'll get the options of a simple workflow with a minimum of fields. The beginning statuses are basically "to do", "in progress", and "done". There's a fair amount of trust in those steps, IMO.
> by default regular users can't change the available transitions
I can't imagine allowing this. This would be a recipe for chaos. The transitions are supposed to indicate agreed-and-defined steps that work goes through. They're supposed to reflect your team/org process, to the granularity that you want to capture it in Jira. Letting anyone edit them ad-hoc is akin to saying there is no process at all for doing work. How would anyone be able to interpret the state of work if everyone has their own ad-hoc process that they can change on the fly?
If that's okay on a team then that team probably shouldn't use Jira. I also would not want to be the team-lead, or anyone else trying to figure out what's going on or keep track of work!
> The transitions are supposed to indicate agreed-and-defined steps that work goes through. They're supposed to reflect your team/org process, to the granularity that you want to capture it in Jira. Letting anyone edit them ad-hoc is akin to saying there is no process at all for doing work. How would anyone be able to interpret the state of work if everyone has their own ad-hoc process that they can change on the fly?
Everywhere I've worked the states have been the steps, the transitions have just been there for Jira's own bookkeeping. And in the real world it's always possible to move a piece of work to any other step in your workflow - things like "the designer's realised he messed up the wireframes, put it back to design even though it was currently in code review" happen all the time. I don't think that's the same as not having any process.
In the Jira way of doing things you can't do that if that transition doesn't exist, and you probably don't have the required permissions to add that transition (if you can even figure out what they are). Couple that with Jira's terrible performance and I've been in more than one company where you could accidentally drag and drop a ticket to the wrong column (because Jira decides to finish loading at the wrong time) at which point it's permanently fucked up and your only option is to copy and paste the data (one field at a time, natuarlly) into a new ticket.
> by default regular users can't change the available transitions
I can't imagine allowing this. This would be a recipe for chaos. The transitions are supposed to indicate agreed-and-defined steps that work goes through. They're supposed to reflect your team/org process, to the granularity that you want to capture it in Jira. Letting anyone edit them ad-hoc is akin to saying there is no process at all for doing work. How would anyone be able to interpret the state of work if everyone has their own ad-hoc process that they can change on the fly?
If that's okay on a team then that team probably shouldn't use Jira. I also would not want to be the team-lead, or anyone else trying to figure out what's going on or keep track of work!