Hide Epic swimlane when marked Done

[Danny Alva]

I'm trying to figure out how to hide an Epic swimlane when I mark it Done or when I mark the  "Epic Status" as Done. 

This thread is the closest I could get but doesn't have a resolution: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/remove-Epics-on-kanban-board-when-marked-as-done/qaq-p/1065700

I'm coming to the realization that until the issue has not been resolved for (minimum) 1 week the issues/epic will not hide but I'm sure there is a way to do it with filters, I just don't have the experience to figure out the the right script.

Please advice

[Esther Strom]

Hi, @Danny Alva - welcome to the Community!

You're right; it can be done with filters, with some caveats.

Caveats

You'll note that I didn't include info on the Epic Status field in my instructions below; best practices indicate that the Epic Status field should not be marked Done before the Epic's actual ticket status is Done, so there shouldn't be any need to include it in your filter. If you don't follow that practice, and do have epics whose Epic Status is marked as done while the epic ticket itself is in an open status, comment back here and I'll write those queries for you.

Also note that if you've swimlaned by epic and some of the epic's children are not Done (which should never happen) those tickets will stay on the board in their swimlane, because the swimlane header is the parent ticket - just because the parent is no longer on the board itself doesn't mean it's not the parent anymore. Make sense? Again, this really shouldn't happen because a parent shouldn't be complete before its children, but if it does, the only way I can think of to kill the swimlane display is to use an automation rule to remove the children from the epic (i.e. make them standalone stories), which isn't really a great practice either.

All that being said, here's how to set up your board filters to not include finished Epics. You do need to have board admin access.

Kanban

Click the three dots menu at the top right of your board and choose Board Settings.

On the initial settings screen (General tab) scroll to the bottom and look for the Subfilter field. If there's anything already in that field, put parentheses around the whole thing, and then after the closing parenthesis, add "AND status != Done", as shown in the screenshot below. If the Subfilter field is currently empty, just put "status != Done".

Now when you move a ticket to the Done column (assuming it's mapped to a status called Done) the ticket will be removed from the board immediately instead of in two weeks. (You will have to refresh your screen; it won't magically disappear.)

Sprint

If you're using a sprint board, go to the board settings, just like with the kanban instructions. On the General tab, find the Saved Filter and click the Edit Filter Query link. (Note that if you're not the owner of the filter, you will need to create a new filter and associate it with the board, or have the actual owner of the filter make the change.)

In the filter edit page, edit your JQL to include the same "AND status != Done" clause as shown in the kanban subfilter instructions above.

Click the Save button, go back to your board, and refresh. Your Done tickets should no longer display on the board.

[Dimitry Polishchuk]

This will hide every issue with status = Done including Story and Sub-Task. what if you have open epics you working on with either story or sub-tasks Done and you want to keep them in Done column for reference until you done with Epic?

How do you hide only Epics with status = Done?

[Matt Bordas]

Agree - I don't want to hide all issues that are Done - just the Epics?