More than One To Do Column in Kanban Board

Question

I have a Kanban board that pulls in all of my issues from across the different projects that I work on. What I want to do is to keep items in the backlog that haven't been prioritized yet, have a column for issues that I'm going to work on this week, and a column for issues that I want to work on today. The problem I'm running into is that when I configure the board I have to select the different statuses from the different projects and move them to a single column.

Is there any way around this?

Mykenna Cepek · Answer

Board columns directly map to Status values in issues. An issue will only appear in a Board column if the Status if that issue matches one of the Statuses mapped to that column. That's just how Boards work in Jira.

As @Trudy P Claspill mentioned, quick-filters are a great way to, for example, focus on on issues which do not have a value set for the Priority field. Simply create a quick-filter with the JQL "priority is empty". Enabling that filter will eliminate all the "prioritized" issues from your board, assuming that's what you mean by prioritized.

Jira Board columns can't be used arbitrarily, such as for your "this week" and "today" usage. Free-form boards like Trello and other tools allow "Kanban boards" that allow any card in any column. Jira Boards are not free-form.

Jira Boards are tied to Jira Projects, and specifically the workflows, issue types, and Status values that have been configured for that Project.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Steve Fitzgerald

Columns in a board view are based on the Status of an issue, period. You can't base the column content on other attributes of the issue.

You can add Quick Filters to select to display subsets of issues at a time. Or you could create Swimlanes to segregate the issues based on your criteria.

In both of those cases you have to be able to identify the issues via a JQL filter. So the question is how can you filter for issues that match your criteria? What fields available in the issues can you use in a JQL filter to find the issues that match these statements?

* What I want to do is to keep items in the backlog that haven't been prioritized yet, 
* have a column for issues that I'm going to work on this week, 
* and a column for issues that I want to work on today.

How do you know if the issue is prioritized? What field in the issue tells you it is or is not prioritized?

How do you know which issues you are going to work on this week? What field in the issue tells you that you intend to work on the issue this week vs. some other week?

How do you know which issues you are going to work on today? What field in the issue tells you that you intend to work on the issue today vs. some other day this week or another week?

Mykenna Cepek · Answer

If you just don't want those "not ready" issues to show on your board, simply put those statuses in the "Unmapped Statuses" (far-right) column:

Jira > Sprint/Kanban View > Board > Configure > Columns

They will still be visible in your backlog.