Trouble creating a swimlane for another project

Question

I have an agile board, call it BoardA. Joe is a member of the BoardA scrum team. Joe is also working on a ticket on another agile board, call it BoardB. I would like for Joe's ticket on BoardB to show up on BoardA. I created a query based swim lane in BoardA with the JQL query "project = BoardB AND assignee = Joe". I expected the swim lane to appear, but it didn't. Any advice for getting this to work?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Swimlanes are for dividing up issues on your board.

They don't change the underlying data on the board, just display it in a different order.

Assuming that your board filter for A currently says "Project = BoardA", then the swimlane saying "project = BoardB and assignee = Joe" is going to do nothing, because the only issues on the board are all from BoardA.  You need to make the board include BoardB issues for the swimlane to do anything.

The most obvious change is to say "project = BoardA or (project = BoardB and assignee = Joe)".   Your swimlane will then do exactly what you expect.  (Although your planning and reporting might not, as you've now drawn a new project into the board!)