How do I filter a Kanban board by stories and their linked issues?

[rpatrick]

For context: I have a Kanban board currently sorted into swimlanes by Epic. Epics represent clients, and stories represent projects for that client. I would like to add a JQL query or quick filter that will allow my team to filter down to a story and its related issues/tasks. My problem is that I can't find a way to do this dynamically; we create a lot of stories/projects and do not want to create an individual query for each one. I did not see a way to make an automation that does this. 

Any help or guidance is greatly appreciated! 

Edited to add: I have tried creating a separate board that categorizes swimlanes by Story but it doesn't separate anything. I also tried the GROUP BY feature with the same result (all issues are combined in the board and not actually separated). 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @rpatrick 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Using the Group By/Swimlane feature set to Stories will give you each Story (standard issue type) as a swimlane with its Subtasks (children) shown as cards in the swimlane.

There is no feature that will let you create swimlanes per standard issue type (story) and show within the swimlane cards for the issues linked to the story.

Jira Cloud also does not have a native feature to allow you to dynamically filter down to individual standard issue type (story) issues.

You could use the Labels field to create a "tag" for each "client project". Apply that tag to each Epic, Story, and linked issues. Then you can filter the board dynamically by the Label value, since Jira automatically provides a dropdown multiple-selection filter for the Labels field. This assumes that all the linked issues are within the scope of your board's filter.

Alternately if you are open to an alternate organization of your issues, you might want to consider making a Jira Project for each client, then convert your Story issues to Epics within the appropriate Client Project, and then convert the linked issues for each converted Story/Epic into a child of the Epic. This assumes that the linked issues are linked to only one Story. If they are linked to multiple Stories this might not work, since a standard issue can be a Child of only one Epic at a time.

[rpatrick]

Trudy, 

Thank you for these suggestions! The Group By/Swimlane feature in theory is what I need, but the board is not behaving as expected as none of the issues are actually organized by Story. Do you know if there are other settings/conditions that might be interfering with this? I've done some investigation but there are no solutions jumping out at me. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @rpatrick 

(Note my name is Trudy, not Judy.)

You said the issues of interest are "related to" the Stories. That makes me think you are using generic Issue Linking to create a relationship between the Stories and the other issues. Can you provide a screen image of one of these Stories with related tasks so we can confirm that? You can obscure the details of the issues. What I'm trying to discern is where the "related" issues appear.

Do they appear under a heading of Subtasks or Child Issues, or do they appear under a heading of Linked Issues?

If they appear under the heading Linked Issues, then Jira does not offer a method to set a swimlane/Group By to Story and see the Linked Issues as cards in that swimline. You would need to consider one of the two suggestions I provided, or perhaps a third party app.

[rpatrick]

Trudy,

(Thank you for correcting me on your name)

You are correct about subtasks, I only had tasks linked to the stories but just tested with a subtask and it is sorting into the swimlanes now. 

Thank you again for your help!

[Trudy Claspill]

You're welcome!