Shouldn't changing the swimlane setting be a user-level configuration?

[Stephen Farrell]

Here's my product suggestion:

A user should be able to turn swimlanes on and off when looking at their board, as easily as turning filters on and off.

Here's the usecase to support this:

When I'm running standup, and I everyone to be able to see their tasks and subtasks, grouped in swimlanes by Story. 

But I also want everyone to understand the overall progress in the sprint, so I want to them to see the progress of the stories across the board. 

Ideally I'd like the everyone in the team to do this themselves on a regular basis, rather than just at standup.

Therefore:

Each user should be able to turn swimlanes on and off easily, and without it impacting how the board appears to other users.

[Tim Perrault]

Hi @Stephen Farrell 

In a company-managed project a user could technically build out a board just for themselves showing their own work. Then there could be the project board which you are using to cover the whole project.

[Stephen Farrell]

Hi Tim. 

I don't think I explained the requirement properly. I'll try to explain it differently.

1: When I'm looking at the board, and I want to turn the swimlanes off, or change the basis of the swim-lanes, it's at least a 5-click process. It could be a two-click process if the drop-down appeared on the board.

2. When I change the swim-lane basis for myself, it impacts all of the other users. This is inconvenient or worse. 

Stephen

[Tim Perrault]

Why not base the swimlanes on Queries so then you can just expand and collapse the swimlane with the relevant information or even use quick filters at the top of the board.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I don't think that's a lot of use.  A board is supposed to represent a team's work, and be a shared view of it.  You can't have a view of progress if everyone is looking at it differently.

But it's a positive thing to allow people to create their own boards to suit the way that they work.  It's all just a view on the same data set.

[Stephen Farrell]

Hi Nic. 

I think you need to justify your claim 'you can't have a view of progress if everyone is looking at it differently'. 

I would argue that if there's only one useful view of progress, then there would be no need to have the option to configure swimlanes or turn them on or off.

I'll give you a more specific example of the problem I'm trying to solve:

In my current project, the development team primarily work on tasks and sub-tasks under stories. 

However, the product team measure progress based on stories.

Therefore, we use swimlanes based on stories at our daily standups, but for assessing progress towards releaseable features, I turn off the swimlanes and filter to see stories only.

Do you understand the use-case?

Stephen

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hi Stephen, 

I do agree with you when you say "I would argue that if there's only one useful view of progress", but that is a very strong argument for "everyone needs to see the same board, in the same way".

The quick-filters are there to allow for focus and dilling-down into detail, but they're not for measuring progress.

Swimlanes are more for workflow stream filtering, which is a bit more related to progress, but if it were done by person, would diminish the team's "I know what others are doing", with no notable positive outcomes.

I think I do understand the use-case, and I think you've got the best approach already.  When I was running scrum teams a lot, in every sprint planning and retro, we "turn[ed] off the swimlanes and filter to see stories only"

I would love to see a simple flag to toggle the swimlanes on or off as part of the current user's view, much like the way you can with quick-filters.  I'd like to have a "raw board" - one with no filters, colours, or swimlanes, which I can then quickly toggle on and off, probably depending on who I'm discussing it with.

But I stand by "if everyone is looking at it differently, you can't have an absolute measure".  People need to be looking at the same thing if they are trying to come to a consensus on something.

[Jason M L]

Hi all,

I have a different product idea for the same use case. Our user story is: "As a scrum master, I want to see the team view during standup but I also want team members to track and update their work on their own, outside of standup."

Currently we use Quick Filters for each person but we have a big team and several other types of filters (never mind why, you scrum purists) so it's getting crowded on top. So I'm thinking of switching to swimlanes by assignee.

Swimlanes are alphabetical, with an option to show unassigned issues on top. It appears to remember display settings (like collapsing swimlanes) in the browser cache so I could collapse everyone else by default.

I'd like the option to show current user as the top swimlane. It could be either a special board configuration, like unassigned issues. Or it could be the ability to add "custom swimlanes" on top, based on a query, then sort the rest by another criteria (like assignee).

Thoughts? Does this idea exist somewhere?