How do I keep sub-tasks in their parent item's swimlane?

[Yossi Geretz]

We organize our Kanban board into three swimlanes:

• Highest Priority (based on priority)
• Bugs (based on item type)
• Everything Else

Our developers typically take an item (Feature, Improvement, Bug, etc.) and create sub-tasks which they then track through the development process. 

For tasks of Highest Priority items we can keep them in their swimlane by setting their priority accordingly.

However, for Bugs, we don't see any way to keep their sub-task in their parent's swimlane because the item type of a sub-tasks is 'Sub-Task'. How do we craft the bug swimlane so that it contains Bug items as well as their child sub-tasks?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Yossi Geretz 

I am guessing that you are using queries for your swim lanes.

Without a scripting add-on, you would not easily be able to determine the parent item is a bug for the sub-tasks. 

As one work-around, you could use an automation rule to set either a label or custom field on sub-task creation, indicating the parent is a bug.  And then, change your swimlane query to search for that.  The rule could be:

• trigger: issue created
• condition: issue type is sub-task
• condition: parent is a bug (perhaps using JQL)
• action: add label to trigger issue indicating it is a bug-sub-task

Another possible work-around is to create a new bug-sub-task type, and then change the swimlane query to check for bugs or bug-sub-tasks.

Best regards,

Bill

[Yossi Geretz]

Thank you @William Sheboy ! That was very helpful!

I created a label which we'll use for this purpose and modified the definition of the swimlane accordingly.

type = Bug OR labels = Swimlane:Bug

For now the assignment of the label is manual. As you suggestion, at some point we might automate this assignment, but even the simple manual approach is very effective, giving us the ability to keep our sub-tasks in the same lane as their parent.

Thanks!

[Bill Sheboy]

Awesome!  I am glad that worked for you. 

When you are ready to take a look at creating automation rules is, here are some examples and documentation to help.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Jira-Automation-all-the-resources-you-need-in-one-page/ba-p/1388465

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/label/all/1453