Order swimlanes on the agile board

[Tolga Tarhan]

Can stories that are shown as swimlanes be ordered (manually)? We'd like to put the most important stories at the top, but the order appears to be random on our board with no obvious way to move things. Ordering subtasks within a swimlane works, as does ordering stories that contain no subtasks (since those don't show up as swimlanes).

[Chris Solgat]

Similar to what Rodolfo mentioned, as long as your board is being sorted by rank, which it sounds like it is, go into the backlog and put your stories in the order that you want.  When you go back into Active Sprints mode, they will now be in the same order as you had in the backlog.

[Kalparaj Biswal]

The problem statement was raised in 2014. Not sure if this still is a relevant question. Still to the inquisitive mind, you can manually sort swim-lanes (Stories) in the backlog view. You can't change the order of swim-lanes (Stories) in the Sprint board. However, when you go to backlog view, you still can see the active sprint there and the stories under it. You can happily change the order of the stories as you want. Go back to the Sprint view. Voila!! the order is changed. Hope that helps!

[Deleted user]

Whatever you have for your swimlane, it has some kind of order that makes sense to JIRA and JIRA will present it in that order.

If the thing you base your swimlanes on is an issue, the swimlanes will be ordered in the same order as the issues. So you can order it by epic link, by summary, by key -- any field that's there.

Those would all be controlled by the filter ORDER BY clause. Change that and the swimlanes line up like little soldiers!

You can set the order on some things: for example, resolutions or priorities.

Some other things, like Type, or Status you're kind of stuck with the id numbers it gives them. If you can delete them and then re-add them to the system it will assign them new id numbers in the order you created them but this tends to be inconvenient.

[Karen Dando]

Hi Tolga - yes, you can order the swimlanes.  If you've already created the swimlanes you'll need to delete them all.  Starting from right to left of the order you want, create your swimlanes in that order.  So if you want "To Do" to be the first swimlane, you'll need to create it last.  If you want "Done" to be the last "column" in your swimlane you'll need to create it first.

My suggestion is that you write down your swimlanes in the order you want so you don't forget one.  If you forget one, you'll need to delete and start over.

[Rodolfo]

The only option that allows you to choose the order of swimlanes is when using "Queries". All the other swimlanes options are sorted out automatically by JIRA.

What I would recommend you is to select Epics as swimlanes. This will allow you to prioritize your Stories and subtasks by rank using drag and drop.