Ideas for card colours on board

Question

Currently, we're not using any card colours within our boards within our small team. I am curious if others have found really useful cases of using card colours that have been helpful for your teams?

We're already displaying the priority, assignee, etc. on the card itself, but with queries existing to be able to change the card colour, curious if there are common use cases for this that others have found.

Some thoughts that I had:

1. By issue type (Bug vs. Change Task)

2. By JQL Query for Epic Due Date Approaching This Sprint

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Aimee Roddick _Walter_

Card colors help improve the visibility of "something", and thus I recommend to take it to your team and discuss: what do we want to see better?

With that information, the team can consider how to use queries to impact card colors to improve visibility...perhaps even partnering with things like automation rules to help with the queries and the color displays.

Using card colors and automation, I have helped teams see indicators you describe, and other ones which were relevant for a point it time, such as:

* Age of WIP / WIP debt (things in progress for a long time, regardless of status / board column, and other work has started in progress since that time)
* flow churn (i.e., items moving backwards in flow)
* assignee churn
* sizing churn (e.g., changes to story points after a sprint has started)
* estimate challenges (e.g., current total time tracking exceeds the original estimate)
* work items carried over from prior sprints
* etc.

As I note above, these were meant to be temporary diagnostic measures (and not metrics), thus the methods to see them led to card colors rather than persistent, stored values.  Your team will likely have good ideas of what they want to see better, and perhaps card colors can help do so.

Kind regards,
Bill

rashworld · Answer

Thanks