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How can I view sub tasks AND linked defects in swimlanes for stories on the Kanban board?

Samantha Zoe Bi

For each sprint my team complete, we create stories and assign sub tasks to each before they are accepted into sprint. During testing, any defects we find for a story or with the ACs are then linked back to the original story.

We use the swimlanes on the Kanban Board so that we can also view the task progress for each story. However, we would also like to view the defects related to each story when expanding the swimlane view. At the moment, defects related to a story appear in the 'Other issues' section which is not very useful when we are trying to discuss the state of each story during standups. Without maintaining a visual board outside of Jira, we cannot see what defects are preventing our stories from being closed by the PO.

I have done some cursory google searches to try and find out if it is possible to see both defects AND tasks related to a story in the swimlanes. I found this answer which suggested that I could set the swimlane option to 'Queries': https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/177329 but I am not sure what JQL to use to see both linked defects AND sub tasks.

I have multiple projects using the JIRA Kanban boards with swimlanes enabled. The 'base swimlanes on' option is set stories. Each sprint we complete can contain multiple epics so we cannot use the epics setting. The assigness option does not provide the information I need and we do not use the Kanban board for multipl projects.

Is there a way to see both linked defects and sub tasks for stories in the Kanban swimlanes?

Accepted answers

All comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

You can't.

JQL returns a list of issues based on some criteria, but the JQL is not the issue.

The board is coded to display stories with their sub-tasks when you select "swimlane by story". That's it. Linked issues don't matter to the swimlane. You can get them on the board if the filter is clever, but they won't land in a swimlane.

This is by design - linked issues generally should NOT be represented as part of a story. Because they're not part of it. They have a relationship, yes, but they're not part of it.

The closest you'll get is swimlane by query - you'll be able to get to "issue x, its subtasks and linked issues", but it will be one swimlane query for each story you want to track this way. It won't be flexible or dynamic, you'll have to create a swimlane query for every issue. Even if you do this, you have another problem - you can link issues in many ways, it's directional and you can have multiple links, so you'd need to account for that.

The simple answer is "your defects are in the wrong place". Raise them as sub-tasks on the stories instead, and it'll all work fine. (Or, as a bit of a bodge if you can't do them as subtasks, raise subtasks that are then linked to one or more defects)

unknown

Agree with Nic.

Another alternative would be to use EPICs and define your swim lanes by those. Stories, subtasks and defects assigned to the EPIC would display in the appropriate lane. Of course this comes with some additional overhead.

Samantha Zoe Bi

Hi Nic,

As part of our agile process, we cannot close a story unless all defects raised against the acceptance criteria in the story are completed. It's not right for us to raise them as tasks against stories in order for them to appear in the swimlanes as they are not tasks to action, they are defects. I realise this may be as per design but this is not realistic as to how we use the stories and defects in a sprint. Is there any way this can be changed (a new feature perhaps or a JQL query we can set) so that we can see (everything) that is linked to a story and the see which column (progress) it is currently in?

Thanks

Samantha

Samantha Zoe Bi

The problem for this is we have one website project that had multiple EPICs by area (donation, publications, events etc) and each sprint completed against the website project (in particular) may contain multiple EPICs. So we cannot use EPICs to dictate our swimlane content.

I can understand why it currently works as it does, but it would be more useful if we had the ability to show everything associated to a story in the swimlanes. i.e defects, sub tasks, queries etc as these all need to be completed prior to completing a story. As per regular story definitions and acceptance criteria.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Ok, this seems wrong to me:

>It's not right for us to raise them as tasks against stories ... as they are not tasks to action, they are defects.
If they are separate defects, then you don't need them in the swimlane. They could be related to the issue, but they're not part of it.

If they need to be closed off before you can deal with the story, that's fine too, they should be in the swimlane, but that makes them part of the story, so they probably should be subtasks.

I think you need to make a firm decision about whether they're part of the story or not.

JIRA won't support your current half-way process, and I very much doubt that Atlassian will ever change the boards that far away from Agile standard processes.

Samantha Zoe Bi

Hi Nic,

Our current process is that a story cannot be moved to awaiting approval (for a PO) until all linked P1/2 defects have been closed and all tasks are complete. This means that there is a need to be able to close a story if there are P3/P4 issues still linked also. Once the PO has performed their checks and accepts the new functionality, the story is then closed.

We link the defects found with a new piece of work to the story itself so that it can be traced back. These are not tasks as they are reports of bugs to be fixed and not tasks to execute or make changes to the current requirements.

It just seems odd to me that a task can be seen in the swimlanes for stories (very useful) but we cannot do this with bugs that are associated to a story. We link the bugs much like you would link a (sub)task to a story. I was hoping you had a clever way for me to do this but it looks like this may be a limitation of JIRA that I cannot customise multiple issue types to be assigned to a story and to appear in the swimlanes if stories are selected.

Thanks

Samantha

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