Kanban board and multiple versions

[Dan Goyette]

We've started using the Kanban board, as our project has moved primarily a "development" phase into a "support" phase. One immediate issue I'm having with Kanban is the "Done" column when an issue contains multiple fix versions. 

It is typical for us to assign multiple fix version to issues, for one of the following two reasons:

• The issue has been fixed on multiple streams of development, in which case the fix versions reflect the specific versions of the application where the fix was made. Very often issues are fixed on both a "hotfix" branch, from which a release is immediately made, as well as on trunk, from which a release will not be made for another couple of weeks. 
• We also associate more long-term versions to issues, reflecting their membership in a large set of issues, such as a "major" release version. Several months may pass while we work on a large set of features, each of which are associated with that version (for example, "Q4 Release"). 

In both of these cases, issues in the Kanban board will be associated both with a fix version that is released, as well as one or more longer-running fix versions which will not be released for some time. The code has been committed, and there's no additional work to perform, but the release simply hasn't been pushed out yet. But I don't want those issues cluttering up the Done column for weeks or months just because there is a single version on them that hasn't yet been released.

Am I trying to use Kanban incorrectly here?  

[Nicolas Bourdages · Accepted solution]

You're not using Kanban incorrectly. There are a few filter modifications that changes this behavior.

Your case could be very simple to fix. The default Kanban subfilter is "fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is EMPTY". You could modify it to only include issues that don't have any released Fix Version: "fixVersion not in releasedVersions() or fixVersion is EMPTY"

Another cusomtization that's popular on my instance is to put an "expiration date" on whatever is in the Done column, since a lot of people use Kanban boards for other uses than software development. I modify the board's base filter to exclude Done issues that are haven't been updated in more than X number of days. The filter queries look like this:

project = myProject AND (status not in (Done) OR status in (Done) AND updated >= -14d)

This means the filter would show all issues, except for Done issues that have been updated in the last 14 days (the updated date being higher than "today minus 14 days", that's what "-14d" means)