Group by epic in Kanban board

[Philip Winston]

This post:

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/04/how-to-manage-a-product-backlog-with-ease/

Says "the PM team then uses swim lanes to group issues by epic" but this:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Configuring+Swimlanes

Specifically says Epics are scrum boards only. Why on earth would that be scrum boards only and how in the blog post from Atlassian are they grouping by Epic? I'm guessing you can make one JQL per epic but that is crazy isn't it?

[Dobroslawa Wierzbicka · Accepted solution]

Indeed, Epics are designed specifically for use on Scrum Boards, for tracking larger bulks of Issues that span across Sprints. Therefore, there's not option for setting Kanban swimlanes automatically based on Epics. If you want to use them, you'll need to manually build a JQL query for each of your Epics.

[Philip Winston]

That seems so odd to me because the two boards look like they are coming from the same code, they look nearly identical. And the above Atlassian blog posts *recommends* using Epics on a Kanban board. But filters are not a bad workaround really, even if I had to define 30-40 of them it's not the end of the world, although updating them all the time might get tiresome. Thanks.

[eXtensi Admin]

Well JQL queries are not the solution here? Its completely unmaintainable for a really large scale projects. Is there a technical reason behind the decision?

[Julio Ramirez]

This how we do: Use a Scrum board, it gives you all the bells and whistles you are probably looking for your kanban at the little cost of dragging every new backlog item to an active (fake & eternal) sprint (\*)

(\*) you need an active sprint for the cards to be show into "work mode"

Complain: I truly don't understand why the epics functionality is truncated in kanban boards. I am sorry, I think the agile templates try to over-protect users from doing other than following the yellow brick road. So you are either kanban or scrum and that's the way you do... :S