Kanban board sums include issues used as swimlanes

[Sebastian Breitzke]

We use the usual Epic / Task / Subtask structure with a canban board with Epic swimlanes.

The problem is that the column counters count the Epics even though they are not displayed as cards any more because they are displayed as swimlanes.

Example: The counter shows 3 but there are only 2 cards because the third one would be the epic.

I tried two solutions

1. Remove the Epics from the filter with IssueType != Epic
   -> turns out all issues which have no epic vanish from the board because they can not be added to a swimlane (because there are no epics which can be used as one). Only Issues without Epics show in a generic one.
2. Do not map the epics status values
   -> this would work because only mapped values are added to the columns and the epics are not shown in any column. Problem here is I can fix it only for some columns because in 2 / 5 columns Epics and Tasks / Subtasks share status values (i.e. Open).

Does any one know a solution? Is this worth to be filed as a bug?

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Sebastian,

The behavior to count Epics on the columns is intended by JIRA, so it would be more like a feature request than a Bug.

A workaround that you can apply is to use different statuses to tasks/sub-tasks, not shared with Epics, then you will be able to implement the second option you mentioned (Not map the Epic Statuses).

E.g: use To Do instead of Open

[Sebastian Breitzke]

Hello Petterson,

thank you for your answer! So this will be my solution #2.

Could you explain what is the reasoning behind it? Maybe we are using it wrong?

For me it's a bit strange because the counter does not match the cards in the columns. One of our boards is quite big with like 20+ swimlines and 100+ tasks the counts are pretty much useless other than showing a trend.

Of course one can argue that the board is too big already and on a smaller board is more clear but still the counts are off then and you always have to count manually if you really want to know how many items are in the column.

In other sections of Jira it shows a counter for the hidden ones, so would not 20 (3 hidden) or 20 of 30 (3 hidden) a better format? I know the "of" part is already showing the total count without filters which already confuses some people.