How can I move tickets to different Kanban columns without changing their status?

Jennifer Morrow May 28, 2015

Hi!  My design & UX team would like to have a Kanban for tickets which are in the idea phase and are being iterated on, tested, and considered for implementation.  However, we want these tickets to come from any project in our organization and not have its status changed.  We'd like any ticket with the label "idea" to come to this Kanban.  However, we don't want to change the actual statuses of these tickets, which live on the Kanban boards of other projects and are part of other teams' JQLs.

Is there a way we can move tickets in columns on a Kanban without affecting their statuses?

Things we tried that didn't work

  1. Making new pre-development statuses for variations of "open."  Doing this negatively affected other teams by changing the status of these tickets.
  2. Having tickets grouped via labels in swimlanes and moving them up and down via swimlane rather than left and right via columns.  Basically a PITA - can't drag, have to constantly edit labels in the tickets themselves, hard to use and hard to read.

What would work if it were possible:

  1. Being able to move tickets to columns while changing nothing, or only changing the label, but not the status.
  2. Visualizing JIRA tickets in another tool where we could move them around without affecting their status, but still have them be a part of other teams' tickets.

Thanks so much!

3 answers

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Gorka Puente _Appfire_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
June 1, 2015

Hi @Jennifer Morrow,

As @Marc and @Nic Brough [Adaptavist] say, when you change an issue to other status column, the status has to change.

However, you could try Comala Canvas for JIRA (Nic, thanks for the mention by the way), which is a great companion for JIRA Agile.

Disclaimer, I work in Comalatech, the vendor of the add-on

With Canvas for JIRA you can create boards customised to your needs. For example, projects as rows and status as columns. If you don't want to transition your issues, you can use a custom field in your columns. Then simply drag&drop to change your issues' attributes i.e., the value of your custom field without changing the status.

Give it a try and let me know what do you think.

Regards,

Gorka

Jennifer Morrow June 2, 2015

Thanks @Gorka Puente [Comalatech], this is very helpful! I'll try out Camala.

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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 28, 2015

The whole point of a Kanban board's columns is that they represent a status (or set of status) within your process.  The status must change if you move columns, by the very definition of what it is for!  It's nonsense to say a column change doesn't mean a change of status.

I'm actually a bit stuck on suggesting a solution, because I can't quite work out what you're actually trying to achieve here.  It sounds like editing issues, but I don't see why that's such a problem.

As a very loose guess, you don't want a kanban board at all, you actually want some form of display where you can edit and sort things on a basis other than an actual process.  As JIRA + Agile is, at its core, an issue tracker where the whole point IS the process, it doesn't do anything like that.  

But... you might want to take a quick look at the "Canvas" add on by Comala.

 

0 votes
M May 28, 2015

You cannot move issues to other columns without changing their statuses.

I would suggest using swimlanes and base their queries on the labels. The issues would stay in the same column based on their status but can move to different swimlanes based on the label. They will effectively be moving vertically instead of horizontally.

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