Custom Swim lanes

[Madhurima Pabbaraju]

Hi,

Our company is new to JIRA and I'm managing admin related work for our users. I received a request today to add custom swimlanes to Kanban board and I'm stuck at writing appropriate query to add swimlanes. I need to add 6 swimlanes. 

Could someone please advise. 

Regards,

Madhurima

[Robert Barrow · Accepted solution]

Hi Madhurima,

Could you provide more details - i.e. how do you intend to segregate the issues into the various swimlanes?  Please supply any existing queries that you have and indicate which are working/not working.

Best regards,

Rob

[Madhurima Pabbaraju]

Hi Rob,

Following are the swimlanes that I need to create.

• Training
  POC
  Projects
  ETL
  Reports/Dashboards
  Infrastructure

Attached is a default query that we see,

[Robert Barrow]

OK.  So what are "Training", "POC", "Projects", "ETL", "Reports/Dashboards" and "Infrastructure" in the context of your project? 

Are they Issue Types? 

Or perhaps you're using Components to achieve this categorisation?

Or some other construct, like a custom JIRA field?

We'll need to know this to provide assistance with the JQL for your swimlanes.

[Madhurima Pabbaraju]

Hi Rob,

These are random options given to me by one of the users. They are not issue types or components or custom fields.

Should they belong to any of the above to be swimlanes?

Thanks,

Madhurima

[Robert Barrow]

In order to have them appear in a swimlane, you'll need some method of categorisation so that you can write the appropriate JQL.

I imagine the users are thinking that you create the swimlanes and then they can just "drag and drop" the tickets in to categorise them, but that's not how it works.

The easiest solution for you is probably just to set the categories up as Components in your project and then configure your board to have a swimlane for each one e.g.

Name Training JQL component = "Training" Description Training

Name POC JQL component = "POC" Description Proof-of-concept

etc.

Remember to leave the "Everything else" swimlane to capture all other issues (that haven't been categorised).

[Madhurima Pabbaraju]

Thank you for providing easy steps, Rob. This was indeed really helpful. 

[Robert Barrow]

You're welcome, Madhurima.

I'm sure you'll find that there are lots of people in the Atlassian community that will be able to help you out when you need it.

If you are going to be doing a lot of JIRA Admin work then I'd recommend taking the official JIRA Administration training courses, which are available in the Atlassian University area of their website. 

Their online documentation is also quite comprehensive.

Good luck!