Can Jira Software Cloud be set to default to use board swimlanes, with Epics for the swimlanes?

[Marc Pincince]

I would like to set our boards for our Classic projects to default to using swimlanes, and to use Epics instead of Queries as the default swimlanes, so that our users don't need to go in and configure the settings. Is this possible? I looked everywhere I could think of for information regarding this and found nothing helpful for cloud. Based on somewhat old posts, it looks like there may be a possibility to set swimlanes via private API if we were using server, but we use cloud. I'm hoping progress has been made in providing more flexibility for this for cloud. Our users want the project board to just be ready to use when then go into their project. They don't want to have to do configuration setup.

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Marc - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I don't know of a way to force all new boards created to have a certain format. 

You could create a template board of sorts that has the setup how you want it, and then create all new boards by copying the template board and modifying the new one for changing the underlying filter and location. But not sure how much time that would save you. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Marc Pincince 

You are correct that this appears possible using the private APIs to alter swim lanes, and public REST APIs to create project/board/filters etc.  I agree with John on the time savings; unless you are regularly standing up/tearing down projects, this may not be worth the effort.  And, I believe the non-public APIs may be subject to change without notice, so that's an issue to consider.

By the way, there appear to be lots of suggestions to add project templates for cloud, which you can review and vote for here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=project%20IN%20(JRACLOUD%2C%20JSWCLOUD)%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20AND%20summary%20~%20template%20AND%20summary%20~%20%22project%22%20ORDER%20BY%20Key

Best regards,

Bill

[Marc Pincince]

Thank you for the quick responses @John Funk and @Bill Sheboy. 

I too agree that copying and modifying a board would probably not save much time overall.

I had successfully used Jira's automation's web request feature to send a few API calls to automatically create a board when a user creates an issue with a specific name. Unfortunately, I got stuck when I wanted to configure it to use Epics for the swimlanes.

Based on the info that Bill provided, I skimmed through the various suggestions for project templates and upvoted a few. I also looked for suggestions specific to board templates, found two, and upvoted them.