How to add custom board to Business project, with swimlanes grouping issues by a field or query

petecog June 6, 2018

We starting to love using Jira Cloud for managing our projects.

I notice that custom boards cannot be added with stock Jira, So i'm open to plugin suggestions.

Background: We've struck upon a project management paradigm that works for us. It's a kind of blend between traditional waterfall and agile. Essentially we specify a project as a set of tasks, each reasonably high level, which are grouped in 'themes' (I've started using the Component field to indicate these), that we roughly schedule into 'Sprints' at the start of the project. We tend to have a lead for each theme.  The schedule indicates when roughly we think we need to have done the task given what has to come before, what's getting delivered (and when), team capacity, and various other features. We have found it gives us the flexibility to move tasks left/right as needed in response to external factors (e.g. finding out something is actually harder/easier than we though at the beginning etc). We use due date to indicate when we think the task needs to be done by. And at the moment, the sprints are labels.

Problem: The stock board doesn't give us the flexibility we'd like. I'd like to quickly visualize the tasks grouped by theme (or by any other variable, including Custom fields). 

Desired solution: I'd like a way of adding more boards to Business Projects that let's me define swimlanes and columns based on any arbitrary choice of field or a query. It would look a bit like a gantt, but not quite.

Has anyone come across a plugin, or work around that might do the trick.

1 answer

1 vote
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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June 6, 2018

I'm afraid core boards are never going to be like that, and Atlassian might well resist anyone writing add-ons that do it.  Because they would want you to get Jira Software to provide the more powerful boards.

petecog June 6, 2018

Nic, thanks. I had a look at Software Boards, and they don't seem to do this either. Well, not quite. 

While it's possible to manually add a swimlane for each group that's needed using a JQL query - a clunky process. It doesn't seem possible to have columns for anything other than the workflow specified statuses. 

Also, I forgot to mention. It would be super handy to apply an overall filter to the board, e.g. to only show tasks with a particular label, or other feature.

Any other ideas welcomed!

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.
June 6, 2018

True, there's no swimlane by group because you're supposed to be working together on common tasks.  Breakdown of work by user/group is more likely to be done either at an assignee level or by having different boards for different groups.

For an "overall filter", there's the quick filters.

petecog June 6, 2018

sorry, I wasn't clear. By 'group' here I didn't mean User Group, I meant a more "group of tasks" e.g. tasks that have some common feature e.g. returned by some query

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