In Review is In Progress

If you’ve ever worked in a "modern" software environment, you’ve likely stared at a Jira board that looks less like a task tracker and more like a circuit diagram for a nuclear reactor. We have "Todo", "Selected for Development", "In Progress", "In Review", "Ready for QA", "In QA", "UAT", and finally—if the gods are kind—"Done".

I have a radical, perhaps offensive, suggestion: Most of those columns are lies.

Your fourteen-step workflow isn’t a sign of organizational maturity. It’s a testament to a lack of trust and a fundamental misunderstanding of what "work" actually is. In the real world, there are only three states that matter:

1. Todo: We haven't started.
2. In Progress: Someone is responsible for it.
3. Done: The user is using it.

Everything else is just In Progress in a fancy hat.

The most egregious offender is the "In Review" column. Project managers love it because it gives them a sense of "velocity." They see tickets moving out of "In Progress" and think, “Ah, the developers are fast!”

No, they aren't. Moving a ticket to "In Review" doesn't mean the work is done. It means the developer has finished their part and is now waiting for someone else to find their mistakes. The task is still In Progress. It is still consuming mental overhead, it is still a line item in your WIP (Work In Progress) limit, and most importantly, it is not generating value for the customer.

If a feature is "In Review" for three days, it was "In Progress" for those three days. Period.

The "Todo, In-Progress, Done" trinity is disciplined. It’s honest. It forces you to confront the reality of your bottlenecks.

• Todo: The backlog. The "someday" pile.
• In-Progress: The focus zone. If a ticket is here, someone is actively ensuring it moves toward completion. If it requires a review, the review is part of the "Progress." If it needs testing, the testing is part of the "Progress."
• Done: It’s in production. It’s shipped. It’s dead to us.

When you limit your columns, you limit your ability to hide inefficiency. You can't hide 50 tickets in "Ready for QA" if there is no "Ready for QA" column. They stay in "In Progress," and suddenly, the "In Progress" column looks terrifyingly full. That’s a good thing. It forces you to stop starting and start finishing.

Complexity is the refuge of the unproductive. We create granular workflows to make ourselves feel busy while we ignore the fact that nothing is actually shipping.

If you want to move faster, stop adding columns. Start deleting them. If it's not "Done", it's "In Progress". Accept the responsibility, face the bottleneck, and ship the damn code.

• "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim: A classic look at how invisible work and complex workflows destroy productivity in IT.
• "Making Work Visible" by Dominica DeGrandis: Excellent insights on how to spot the "time thieves" in your workflow (like "In Review" wait times).
• "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" by David J. Anderson: Learn the actual philosophy of WIP limits and why column bloat is the enemy of flow.