Is there a way to skip swimlanes when moving a task in my Kanban board?

Question

I have one project with two Kanban boards under it. Both Kanban boards have their own swimlanes, however the project consists of one workflow. I'm wondering if I have to create two workflows or if there is a way to skip over swimlanes when assigning a task to a swimlane. If there is a way to skip swimlanes when moving tasks then I should be good.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I think you are confusing "swimlanes" with "columns".

* Columns are columns on the board, collections of issues grouped by their status.
* Swimlanes are rows running across the board, grouping cards in columns by almost any criteria you want.

Assuming you mean columns, not swimlanes, then your question comes down to the workflow - the workflow determines the paths between status (which then determine what column an issue is in).  Imagine the simple case of to-do -> in progress -> done for the status, and you have the status mapped into columns in the same way.  If you want to move an issue from the to-do column straight to the done column, then the workflow needs a transition from to-do to done to enable it on the board.

Jack Brickey · Answer

So you cannot move an issue between swimlanes, at least not by dragging and dropping. To have an issue appear in a new swimlane you would need to modify the issue such that it the falls into the parameters defined by the swimlane. For example...

If your swimlane is by Queries and the queries are by priority then if you change the priority of the issue it would move to the new swimlane. Or if your swimlanes are by Epic then you would have to move the issue from one epic to another. Etc...

I still feel like we are not yet aligned in the understand but hope we can get there.

Krystina Villarreal · Answer

Hi Jack,

Thank you! Sorry, so both Kanban boards show issues, however each Kanban board has it's own swimlanes. Basically, one board has 5 swimlanes and the second board is a simplified version only showing 3 of those 5 swimlanes. In either board I'd like to be able to move an issue from one swimlane to another. However, the second board is not letting me move swimlanes as I want because it is recognizing the 5 swimlanes that the first board has and therefore, I am unable to move an issue as I want in the second board because I would be skipping over a couple lanes compared to the first board. Hope that makes sense.