How to make issues part of a board without them being in a sprint?

[John Stock]

Hi - I have a project with a lot of Story issues, where the Storys are not part of any sprint, because they're generally longer in duration (I use Tasks to manage sprint-level things in the iteration boards).   I'd like to create a board and have it display attributes of my Sprints. (or Features or whatever) but from everything I'm reading in order for you to get something to show up on board it has to be assigned to a sprint / iteration.

Along those lines - I would also like to be able to show a given board for non-active iteration - is that possible?   The only way I see to be able to view issues that are not in the currently-active iteration is via the backlog view - however the backlog view is just a flat list, with no swimlanes.  It would be nice to see a swimlane view for non-active (future) iteration.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @John Stock 

You can create a Kanban board to show issues regardless of their assignment to or lack of assignment to a Sprint.

You could create a Kanban board based on a filter to show issues that are not assigned to any past, current, or future sprint; i.e. your Storys. For that you would use this filter:

issueType=Story and Sprint is empty

Note that in this case the issue would need to have never been assigned to and left in a sprint. If it was assigned to a sprint and subsequently removed from the sprint, that would remove the value from the Sprint field. But if it was assigned to a sprint, left in the sprint, and the sprint was completed, then the sprint ID would still remain in the Sprint field.

You could create a Kanban board based on a filter to show issues that are assigned to future sprints. For that you would use this filter:

sprint in futureSprints()

 That would pick all issues that are assigned to sprints that have not been started. Since an issue can't be assigned to an Active Sprint and a Future Sprint at the same time, this would exclude issues in the Active sprints. It would also exclude any issues in the Backlog.

You would not be able to create swimlanes dynamically based on those Future Sprints though. Since it would be displayed in a Kanban board there is no built in swimlane for Sprints. If you wanted swimlanes per each future sprint you would have to create Swimlanes based on Queries and build a query for each future sprint.