In Greehopper's "Work" board, user histories with no sub-tasks are grouped under the swimlane "Other Issues", thus losing its priority.

[Fernando Claros]

In Greehopper's "Work" board, user histories with no sub-tasks are grouped under the swimlane "Other Issues", thus losing its priority.

Example:

• My QA team creates a bug. It is a standard issue, type bug.
• This bug ends up in our backlog.
• Our Product Owner (Continuosly revising our backlog)decides he wants it resolved this Sprint, so he moves it to our current Sprint and prioritizes it.

Up to this poing, everything's fine. The problem comes here:

• This bug has no sub-tasks. In Greenhopper's work board UI, all issues with no sub-tasks (no matter which type) are grouped under a swimlane at the bottom of the work board, disregarding their priority.
• The next time a developer looks at the work board for his next task, he doesn't know which is most urgent.
• At the moment, we are creating always a sub-task for each item in the product backlog (user story, bug or whatever it is), but that creates overhead and adds no real value to us.

Is there anyone suffering this problem too? Are we doing something wrong?

[Peter Van de Voorde · Accepted solution]

Hi Fernando,

You could base your Swimlanes on queries and add the swimlane with the following JQL to the top (issuetype=Bug) that should place your bugs always in a seperate swimlane on top.

If you do this you will loose the Swimlanes based on stories, so this might not be what you want.

Best regards,

Peter

[Fernando Claros]

Wow, I didn't know I could do that.

You are right, I need my story-based swimlanes, but now it's clear to me that I need to investigate further what kind of things can we do with JQL. Maybe there's something there we could use for this problem.

Thanks a lot.

[Dave Todaro]

We have the same exact problem. We only create sub-tasks if the bug or story is estimated to take more than 4 hours to get to "Done." I would like our task board ("Work" rapid board view) to appear as folllows, preserving the product backlog order defined on the "Plan" view:

Bug (no subtasks)

Bug

- Subtask

- Subtask

Story (no subtasks)

Story

- Subtask

- Subtask

- Subtask

Story (no subtasks)

Without this capability, there's no way for the team to work in the product owner-specified priority order unless we create a "fake" subtask for every bug or story which, as Fernando points out, is a waste of time and provides no value...it's just a work-around.

Please help!

Thanks,

Dave

[Fernando Claros]

That's exactly my problem, Dave. Thanks for the description, it's really easy to understand in the way you put it.

In the meantime, I'm trying to find plugins to make easier to create sub-tasks.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.jira.copy-to-subtask-plugin

If someone finds a plugin to create automatically sub-tasks, I would love to try it.

Thanks!

[Tom Haraldsen]

Try: Configure | Swimlanes --> Base Swimlanes on "No Swimlanes"

[Fernando Claros]

Thanks for your suggestion, Tom.

I have tried and it solves a part of the puzzle, but at the cost of losing the relative priority between columns that provide story-based swimlanes, which I'd like to maintain.

Good suggestion, though, and gave me an idea about some other thing I needed, so thanks indeed.