How can I have sub-board-specific timelines for sub-boards grouped into one board?

[Carly Mojica]

I have one over-arching board with three sub-boards. I'd like to set it up so that each sub-board has its own timeline, and the over-arching board shows the timeline for all sub-boards. However, the timeline is the same for the over-arching board and all sub-boards. It's set up as a kanban software project, company-managed.

Does anyone know of a way to have distinct timelines for the sub-boards?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Carly Mojica 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Exactly how have you create your "sub-boards"? Are these actually separate boards with independent board filters that pull a subset of issues that are included in the over-arching board?

Are you using the Timeline option available in the left-side navigation panel for the board?

[Carly Mojica]

I am using the timeline option in the left-side panel. 

To create the sub-boards, I created my first board (title: Vision) provisioned as a company-managed kanban board. Then, I clicked "create board" and then "board from an existing project" then selected the Vision board. I want four total boards:

• Vision 
  • Design
  • Research
  • Engineering

I would like for the Design, Research, and Engineering sub-boards to each have their own backlog and timelines. The Vision board would have all backlog items for the sub-boards in its backlog (to see them all combined) and the timeline be a combined view of the sub-boards.

Disclaimer: super new to Jira and this all seems complex. So if I'm missing something obvious, please let me know!

Carly

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Carly Mojica 

When you elect to create a board "from an existing project" Jira automatically creates a filter for that board to pull in all issues from the specified project.

If you go into one of those sub-boards and select Configure Board...

...and then click on the General option...

...and scroll down to the Filters section you will see the actual filter criteria (1) and the name of the saved filter (2) that was created by that operation.

If you want to change the filter to select a subset of issues from the project, then you can click on the Edit Filter Query link at (2). That will take you to the "View all issues" page showing you the filter query and the results. There you can change the filter and save the changes, and those changes will become active wherever that saved filter is used.

Have you already determined how you will identify to which sub-board each issue will belong? Note that whatever method you use, you will have to use that method on all the issues - i.e. Story/Task issues and their Sub-tasks.

[Carly Mojica]

Thank you for the reply, Trudy.

To answer your last question, yes - I have. I created unique issues for each board and started them with the sub-board name. So for example, Eng To Do, Eng In Progress, Eng Done, Des To Do, Des In Progress, etc. I think that will work. 

One question regarding the variable names in the filter. How do you know the variable names for filters? 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello Carly,

Can you provide an example of an issue for one of these sub-boards showing the field that you are using to indicate the sub-board you want the issue to display in? I want to be sure I understand what you mean by you "started them with the sub-board name".

I'm also not sure what you mean when you say "variable names in the filter", as I did not use that term.

[Carly Mojica]

I'm not sure if this is the right approach... but here's what I did. Within each sub-board, I created my issue types to start with the name of the sub-board. For example, I have engineering and design sub-boards on this over-arching board. The issue type is assigned to the design sub-board by selecting an issue type with "design" + the name of the issue type. Then, I have that issue type provisioned to display for that sub-board only. On the over-arching board, I pull in all of the issue types from both the engineering (eng) sub-board and the design sub-board. Does that make sense? Did I do that correctly? 

In regard to your second question, what I mean by "variable names in the filter" is the "project" value under Filter Query in the screenshot example you shared. I guess my question was more of an aside... When setting up filters, how do you know how to type the column name to apply a filter? Is it the column name in camel case or something else? 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Carly Mojica 

The screen image you provided is not a list of Issue Types. That is a list of Statuses that can be assigned to issues. Most of the available issue types for a project are displayed in the Create Issue dialog:

I say "most" because you can't create a Sub-task type of issue from the Create Issue dialog, so those issue types don't show in the list.

The Issue Type of the current issue you are view in your image can be seen by hovering over the issue type icon in the breadcrumbs at the top of the display.

What you have shown, as I said, are the Status values that are available for the current issue you are viewing, given its current status. Those come from the Workflow associated with that type of issue for that project.

Personally I don't think using Workflow Status values is a good way to designate the sub-board on which you want an issue to display. Do your teams actually use different workflows for their work? It makes an overly complicated workflow to have all those different statuses. And, as you can see from your list, all the statuses can be used in the current issue. Do you really want to transfer issues from one team to another by changing the status of the issue?

You could truly use Issue Types, though again, that is not what I would recommend unless your teams/sub-boards really have different types of work or need different workflow statuses for their work.

Typically the Team field is used to specify the sub-team that "owns" an issue, and then that field is also used to filter the issues that should display on a board. For more information on Teams refer to this document:

https://support.atlassian.com/atlassian-account/docs/what-is-an-atlassian-team/

Regarding the creation of filters, you can learn more about that through this documentation:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/search-for-issues-in-jira/

If you are unfamiliar with the creation of filters you should start with reviewing the documentation on using the Basic interface to create filters. When you use the Basic interface you can use the Switch to JQL option to see how the JQL statement looks for the options you select for your filter. Generally filters are based on setting selection criteria based on the values of fields in the issues. "project" is a field associated with the issue. The documentation I linked above provides more information.

May I ask what is your level of experience with configuring projects in Jira? If your experience is limited you may find it useful to visit https://university.atlassian.com and explore some of the free training that is available there.