Filter for boards?

[Cem Mandirali]

Hello,
I am new to JIRA and have the following problem:
We have a team of 20+ people, with subteams. Each of them working on different topics. We want to use KANBAN.

The idea was to create a project for the whole team and to split the subteam topics via boards, because we want to see all Issues of the whole team but also filter for one topic.

One Kanban board for topic_1 was already created with Issues in it. I created another one for topic_2 but immediately saw all Issues from topic_1 also in it.

The team does not want to fill labels or custom fields for each of the issues when they create them, so my question is: is there a way to set up a filter that shows Issues belonging to a specific board? Or would it be better to set up a Board for the team and multiple projects for the topics?

Aren't the Issues created in a project AND in a board? Because when I hit the plus sign on the global sidebar, the Issue is inserted into the board I am currently looking in.

Thanks in advance

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Boards are not containers for issues, they are a view of a set of issues, and that set is selected by a filter.  There is no "issue belonging to a board" - an issue belongs to a project, and is then chosen for inclusion on a board.

You don't need to set up "a filter that shows issues belonging to a board" - the board already has a filter.  

If you need to divide issues across two boards, and have them exclusive (i.e. an issue on one board does not appear on another), then you need to make the board filters ignore issues you don't want to see.

You do not say how you are identifying issues as belonging to topic_1 or topic_2, but however you are, you need to filter for it on the boards.  If, for example all topic_1s are in project X and topic_2s in Project Y, then use filters "project = X" and "project = Y".  Or if you have a label for them, use "labels = topic_1" and "labels = topic_2", and so-on.

[Cem Mandirali]

Well it says "Add Issues to the KANBAN Board" in the documentation, so I thought somewhere in the metadata there might be a link, not only to the project, but also to the board the Issue is connected to, see screenshot

I am identifying issues as belonging to topic_1 with their place of creation: If an issue was created in board_1, it belongs to topic_1, etc.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a poorly written phrase which suggests boards might be containers.  This is wrong.  I would have written something more like "A quick link to create issues from the board"  

Especially as you could create issues that do not go into a board (For example, if you have a board based on "label = x" and you don't put label x on the new issue when you create it)

>I am identifying issues as belonging to topic_1 with their place of creation: If an issue was created in board_1, it belongs to topic_1, etc.

That does not work because the board is a view, not a container.  If you want separate boards to show different sets of issues, you need to tell Jira how to identify them as different sets, and then set the board filters to understand the data.

[Cem Mandirali]

Ok that means there is no filter attribute for boards (because boards are not containers). You need to to separate Issues with an additional custom field value to split them into multiple boards within one project, right?

How about creating a Board on top level for the whole team and then multiple projects with project boards (=topic board) for each topc? That would result in many projects but the user won't need to fill in labels for each Issue created.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's correct, you need something to distinguish between the issues so you can separate them out between boards.  A custom field is a good option for doing that, and "topic" sounds like a good name for it in this case!

And yes, multiple boards can work really well.  If you have "one board per distinct topic", or you have "one board per project" (which saves you needing another field for the distinguishing thing) that's a good start.  I would almost always add other boards that slice up the data differently - especially one that says "any topic/project"