Jira blocked status, flag or “is blocked by”

New to blocking links in Jira? Start with What “blocks” means.

A work item is stuck, and you want Jira to say so: on the board, in a search, and to the team that holds it up. Jira has three ways to mark it, and each says something different. On Atlassian Community it reads “I link stories appropriately but in the backlog view, I want to be able to visually see that stories are blocked by another story based on the linked issues” (Community, December 2024). This page says what each way shows and where it stops, then what Blockline does.

Three ways to mark a work item blocked

• A Blocked status. A space admin adds it to the workflow, which “will affect all spaces that use the workflow” (Atlassian). The board gets a Blocked column. It says the work stopped, not what stopped it.
• A flag. Jira’s impediment marker: More actions › Add flag on a board or backlog, with a comment if you add one. The card turns yellow, and the flag is a field called Flagged with one value, Impediment (Atlassian). It fits a blocker outside Jira, such as a supplier or a decision. It names nothing either: the reason is in the comment, if anyone wrote one.
• An “is blocked by” link. Jira’s own Blocks link type: STOR-4 is blocked by PAYC-3, and PAYC-3 shows “blocks STOR-4”, so the other team sees it on their own work item. It is the only one of the three that names the blocker. The timeline draws it as a line, but “can only show work items with the Blocks work item link type and link work items from a single space” (Atlassian). The board and the backlog show no sign of it, which is the question above.

To get the yellow card from a link, Jira Automation keeps the two together. A rule on the Work item linked trigger, set to the Blocks link type, adds the flag; a second on Work item link deleted takes it off (Atlassian). Neither runs when the blocker is done, so a finished blocker leaves the flag on until someone removes the link.

A search for each

• status = Blocked, once the status exists.
• Flagged = Impediment for every flagged work item.
• issueLinkType = "is blocked by" AND statusCategory != Done for open work items that wait on another.

None of them finds an epic held back by its stories, since the links and flags are on the stories. That search, and where it stops, is in Find the Jira epics blocked by another team.

With Blockline

Blockline is our app. It reads the “is blocked by” links your teams already make, across spaces, and says what none of the three does: whether the blocker lands in time.

• Every epic, worst first. A space’s Blockline tab lists its epics with a level and the reason: “At risk: PAYC-3 blocks STOR-4 and lands 6 days after this epic’s date”.
• Through the stories. A link on a story counts towards its epic, so the epic a blocked story holds back shows it.
• A done blocker stops counting. It reads “Done: no longer blocks anything”, and the risk it brought goes with it.
• Across teams. Apps › Blockline over the spaces you pick, a saved filter or JQL.
• Blockers no one owns. The Data health tab lists the open blockers with no date and those with no assignee (Fix gaps in your data).

Blockline does not read a Blocked status or a flag: only the links, the Blocks type by default and any other you tick in its settings. Its own Blocked level means a circular dependency, two work items waiting on each other. The seven rules are in How risk is judged. More on the Blockline home page.