Group by swimlanes not working if filter limits epics on display

[Kirsten Achtelstetter]

I'm stuck with a problem and need a fresh pair of eyes...

We have one project for all the work the development team has to do across BAU/Support and new functionality/projects. Every major project deliverable translates into an Epic in Jira, while Support and BAU tasks get grouped into a BAU epic.

We want to have two separate boards (within the same project) - one for BAU and the other for Projects. But whenever I exclude the BAU epic in the board filter I can no longer use the epics as swimlanes.

So this: "project = ALPHA ORDER BY Rank ASC" shows me a full Kanban board with swimlanes around epics which is perfect. All we now want to achieve is hiding the BAU epic from view as that has its own separate board.

Changing the filter to "project = ALPHA and "Epic Link" != ALPHA-729 ORDER BY Rank ASC" still shows 300 results in the issue search but when I change the board filter to use this updated version I get "No issues currently visible" while having swimlanes set to Epics. If I use swimlanes against any other selection (eg assignee or story) it works fine.

Is this a bug or am I doing anything wrong?

[Kirsten Achtelstetter]

That only excludes the "BAU" epic itself, ie that one issue - my search results go from 880 to 879 rather than the 300 odd it should be dropping to.

It seems like the obvious way to get around this would be to include the epics I do want to see would be to list all the epics that are in scope but that is obviously going to be an outdated list very quickly and is much less powerful than just saying "all - 1".

Any other ideas? All I seem to be able to find when googling this points to me having to install the ScriptRunner plugin, which I won't be able to do given budget impact.

[Tarun Sapra]

Hello @Kirsten Achtelstetter 

Could you please elaborate as to what you expect on the second board, do you expect all the epics on the 2nd board because if the epics are not there then you can't use swimlanes by epic. Hence you would need epics in the search results but you can't use the epic link field as that will not fetch epics but only stories.

[Kirsten Achtelstetter]

I need all the epics and associated stories / tasks / subtasks that make up the project APART from the ones linked to the BAU epic. Effectively I need a way to exclude all stories linked to the BAU epic but show everything else. 

[Tarun Sapra]

project = ALPHA and ! (key in ("ALPHA-729") or "Epic Link" = ALPHA-729) 

Try this query, it will get all issues but epic 729 will be ignored and all stories which have epic-link 729 will be ignored as well. 

[Kirsten Achtelstetter]

Sadly that doesn't work either - it yields the same result as just excluding the Epic Link Alpha-729; ie all epics are filtered out thus making grouping by epic impossible.

There must be a way to include all epics except one, without having to list all the epics to include (which would mean that we would have to update the query every time we create a new epic)??

[Tarun Sapra]

Hello @Kirsten Achtelstetter 

"There must be a way to include all epics except one"

Can you share the issue navigator screenshot of this query

project = ALPHA and ! (key in ("ALPHA-729") or "Epic Link" = ALPHA-729) 

Because this query should should fetch all issues except epic 729 or child stories of epic 729

[Kirsten Achtelstetter]

This is what it should be returning - 408 stories/bugs/tasks and 29 epics

This is what your query returns - exactly 29 epics short.

[Tarun Sapra]

Hello @Kirsten Achtelstetter 

The problem is in the query

project = ALPHA and "Epic Link" != ALPHA-729 

Epic-Link exists only on stories/tasks and not on epics so automatically you have excluded all the epics.

Try the query

project = ALPHA and key not in ("ALPHA-729")