Search scrum board using custom field values

[kate reeder]

Is there a way to search the scrum board based on custom field values? 

We are using a scrum board with JIRA Software (this is a Company-Managed JIRA project). I have two use cases for this:

USE CASE #1: We have a custom field for the Request ID - this is our company's unique identifier for each development request initiative. Often development requests result in multiple development tickets (aka: JIRA issues). I want a way to filter the board and only see the issues that align with a particular Request ID. I might want to filter the board for Request ID 123 today, and may want to filter the board for a different Request ID tomorrow. I can create a quick filter to filter the board for a specific Request ID, but I don't want to create 75 quick filters that I'll need to update every month as we rotate thru different active Request IDs. We could build Epics for each Request ID, but often these Request IDs are not big enough to really be considered Epics as they don't span multiple sprints and can be small in scope. 

USE CASE #2: We have a custom field for the Assigned QA Tester - This is the team member who will QA the development work aligned with the development request (aka: JIRA Issue). I want a way to filter the board and only see the issues assigned to a given QA Tester. I can build quick filters for this, but that would require a quick filter for each QA Tester. The QA Testers don't change frequently, so if this is the only way it can be done, I can create multiple QA filters, one for each QA tester. It would be better though if I can just search the board for a specific tester as needed, instead of building multiple Quick Filters for this. 

[Fabian Lim · Accepted solution]

Hi @kate reeder

I recommend you use a 3rd party plugin that allows you to filter tickets easily without having to use a crazy amount of Jira filters.

The one I recommend for your use case is rich filters which is easy to use, but there are a bunch of other options in the marketplace.  

Regards

[kate reeder]

Thanks for the suggestion, Fabian! I'll look into this

[kate reeder]

@Fabian Lim I'm checking out Rich Filters and see that there are some really cool filter options for dashboards. ...do you know if this plug-in allows you to create custom filters on the scrum board? ...or is this only a tool to enhance filter options on the dashboard?

[kate reeder]

For posterity I'm capturing that I talked to Rich Filters and they advised their solution is only for the dashboards, it can't do anything with the scrum board. 

[kate reeder]

Updating again for anyone who's interested... Rich Filters is what we went with and has turned out to be a great solution for these use cases. 

[Kendall Alton]

@kate reeder thank you for updating this thread with your latest findings.  So did you determine that Rich Filters can also manage filters on scrum boards?  thanks!

[kate reeder]

@Kendall Alton Rich Filters can't manage filters on the scrum board, it is just for the dashboard. BUT we have been really happy with it as a solution. We've just instructed the team that if they want to do more complex searching and filtering to use the dashboard and no one has had an issue with this. 

A few things we've learned that have helped us with the scrum board filter challenges: At our company, the team members spending most of their time on the scrum board are the developers and they are typically only concerned with tickets assigned to them; the out-of-the-box 'only my issues' button meets this need well. The folks running more complex filters seem to typically be the PMs, BAs, leadership, etc. so they're happy to work off the dashboard and don't need to work directly from the scrum board as much as the developers. Rich filters meets the needs there. The QA team members work in both scrum board and dashboard. To make it easier for the QA team working on the scrum board, we added a couple columns to the scrum board called 'Ready for QA' and 'QA in progress'. This helps to mitigate the need for the QA team to need to filter for tickets where they're the 'Tester' on the scrum board. They can still filter for this if they want on the dashboard, but when on the scrum board they typically are just concerned with what's in their QA columns. 

Hope this helps!

[Kendall Alton]

@kate reeder , thank you for the details and how you were able to resolve your use cases.