Customise swimlanes to prioritize stories

connor May 17, 2022

Hey there,

I've been trying to figure out a way to create a Kanban board that displays the tickets associated with a Story. With the Swimlane being the story itself. For example:

Epic: Cool Game (This doesn't necessarily have to be present on the Kanban board)

Story 1: Cool Game version 0.0 (Its own swimlane)

Story 2: Cool Game version 0.1 (Its own swimlane)

Using the board above, it's my goal to be able to assign Bug/Task tickets to the Story and have those tracked through our workflow within the Kanban board. Since the Epic is an evergreen product but continues to receive updates I want to use Stories as way to track the versioning between each update.

Hopefully allowing me to have 1 evergreen Epic, that has X number of versions (stories), and the tickets (tasks/bugs) associated with each version that are visible within the Kanban board when necessary.

A quick example I threw together below. Where I'm hoping to have BUG TEST appear in the swimlane for Version 0.0.1:Screen Shot 2022-05-17 at 12.57.11 PM.png

I appreciate any help that can be provided, thanks!

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Trudy Claspill
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May 17, 2022

Hello @connor 

The native issue parent/child hierarchy in Jira is:

Epic > general issue types > Sub-tasks

In the "general issue types" level is Story, Bug, Task, etc.

Jira doesn't natively support/recognize a parent/child relationship between issues in the "general issue types" level.

Rather than make the Story represent your version, you could use the Release feature to create Release/Versions. Then in each Story/Task/Bug you could use a custom Version field for Targeted Version, and set that to the version in which you want those items addressed. You could then display your swimlanes based on Targeted Version.

Jira does not have a built in selection for Swimlanes by Version so you would have to construct a JQL query for each version and add them to create swimlanes. 

connor May 19, 2022

Thanks for the help, looks like I'll have to set up a 2 or so boards and separate out our work between them so it doesn't get to messy or overbearing with managing the filters in each board.

Appreciate the help!

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John Funk
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May 17, 2022

Hi Connor - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

What type of project are you using? 

connor May 17, 2022

Hey John, currently it's a Company Managed Software level project.

John Funk
Community Leader
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Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 17, 2022

Great - so you should be able to add a swimlane based on JQL and enter a filter like:

Key = ABC-123 where ABC-123 is the issue key for the evergreen Epic. 

connor May 17, 2022

I think that's getting me closer, but not fully there at least from what I've tried. I'll list what I've got below:

ME-1 - is Epic #1

ME-2 - is a Story, associated with Epic#1 version 0.0

ME-3 - Is a Story, associated with Epic#1 version 0.1

ME-4 - Is a Bug, associated with Epic#1

ME-5 - Is Epic #2

Me-6 - Is a Story, associated with Epic#2, version 0.0

 

This is what I've placed in my board settings, and how it now appears in the Board itself.

Screen Shot 2022-05-17 at 1.44.35 PM.pngScreen Shot 2022-05-17 at 1.44.46 PM.png

As an additional question, is there a JQL I'll be able to write that pulls in each Epic I write automatically and displays the Stories set to Open within the Kanban? We plan to have many evergreen epics that receive updates, so I hope when we close a Story (version) it'll remove itself from the Kanban automatically.

I'm pretty new to this level of JIRA management, so thanks for the patience on explaining. I appreciate it!

connor May 17, 2022

I'm thinking part of the problem is I also need a proper connection between Story, acting as a Parent, to the Bug ticket which would be a child.

Much like an Epic acts as the parent to Stories.

John Funk
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 17, 2022

You can do the Bug part, but you would need to create the Bug issue type as a Sub-task type. Then you could have the bug be under the Story. 

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connor May 19, 2022

Thank you for the help! It ended up giving me some ideas on how I can sort this out - looks like I will need to make a couple boards to do the work I want to accomplish.

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