Show Assignee on Epic Swimlanes?

Question

Hi,

In our Active Sprint view in JIRA we present Epics as swim lanes with the issues to deliver that epic as items in the Swim Lane being worked on to deliver the Epic.

The team have just had a useful discussion about how we work and we've decided that, in order to make our dailies a bit more focused the Assignee of each Epic should represent the epic at our dallies (we0re quite a large team, some would say too large) but we're in a good enough space for the team to be able to define how we work.

Our dailies would flow much better if we could see the assignee on the Epic swim lane. How can we make this happen?

Best regards
Pete

Peter Jones_kswyqy · Answer

Thank you Arthur.

Yes, it would be very useful to us.

I have added my vote :)

Arthur Isaak_b4x2gs · Answer

@Peter Jones

I don't know if you are still pursuing this since you question was posted almost a year ago. But there is actually a feature request for something  similar that is being tracked here: [JSWSERVER-16396] Cannot display assignee name at story level on active sprint board - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

Peter Jones_kswyqy · Answer

HI Amit,

Thank you for taking time to reply.

I will start with a caveat! As an organization we're not really agile. My focus is on mindset change and I am driving this on live projects (the only way). We've reached a point where this team are very comfortable discussing improvements and evolving.

By "not really agile" I mean:
- we have a fixed corporate release cycle of either two or three weeks (needs to change but will take time).
- we still do "waterfall within a sprint" (okay for now - it is currently there for a reason).
- many teams use Epics as (endless) Categories of stuff rather than big stories (one of the things we have recently "got over" in the team I want to support with the above change)
- we are moving on from command and control leadership to something more useful but that is taking time.

In the context of this, I am not so precious about executing textbook scrum. In fact, some of our projects are certainly better suited to Kanban ways of working and some would deliver better outcomes using waterfall.

I see agility is a means to an end. We need to use the right tools for the job and this might differ across the firm.

Our dailies are always sub 15 mins, often sub 10. We have successfully switched from what individuals have done to how are we progressing towards delivering this piece of functionality.

As a next step we would to steer the dailies away from feeling like progress meetings to focus more on dealing with blockers (encourage swarming) and registering significant deliveries.

The team have come up with the idea that we should focus dailies on how we deliver business value and THEY would like someone to be responsible for each epic. I see my role as supporting their evolution (and steering it if required) and maintaining an environment where they feel able to make changes.

Aside from that, I spend a bit of time twiddling with this JIRA thing trying to make it do what the team need:)

Best

Pete