Tasks wrapped by epic for one project but not for another on scrum board

[Rafael Hostettler]

I have a scrum-board that pulls in different projects.

The Swimlanes are defined through filters, splitting the tasks by projects.

The board filter is 

project in (PA, PB, PC, PD) AND sprint in openSprints() ORDER BY parent ASC, priority DESC

Now what I get is that for some projects, the cards are rendered with a grey box around them containing all issues for that epic, and for other projects the epic is shown on the card in color. 

I'd like to have 1 behaviour, preferably the wrapping one. How can this be achieved?

[Daniel Ebers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rafael Hostettler

adding to the great information of Trudy and Esther I just wanted to pass on a thread with screenshots which helped me a lot in understanding the differences for columns.

•  Sub tasks showing as their own issue card on board 
  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/New-to-Jira-questions/Sub-tasks-showing-as-their-own-issue-card-on-board/qaq-p/1767153

It seems to make a difference if the parent of an issue is in the same column when looking at it or not.
Playing around with the scenarios today I got confused at the end on how the representation in the end really is - looking at the linked thread helps me always to recap how it is really intended to be.

Maybe this helps you, too - in some way.

Regards,
Daniel

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Can you provide a screen image that shows us what you are seeing?

Are the source projects all Company Managed projects, or all Team Managed projects, or a mix?

When you say the swimlanes are defined through filters, do you mean you've set SwinLanes to Queries, and then defined filters to set the content of each swimlane? Projects is a selection available for Swimlanes, so you could be using that instead of defining individual lanes with queries/filters. But if you are using queries/filters for your swimlanes, can you show us those also?

[Rafael Hostettler]

They're a mix.

Wrapped: 

What's really curious:
- company managed project: tasks in epic get wrapped, stories in epic not

- team managed project: everything gets wrapped, as long as it has an epic assigned

[Trudy Claspill]

Can you show us what you have set up for the Swimlanes, please?

[Rafael Hostettler]

The behaviour is identical if I set Swimlanes to "Project" (Reason I haven't is that I wanted to sort the projects and also sometimes combine several projects into one swimlane (e.g. when we have client projects, I'd want them all aggregated in one swimlane)

Yes, see attached:

I'll also post a screenshot of the fullboard to answer Esther in a few mins.

[Esther Strom · Accepted solution]

@Rafael Hostettler can you please provide screenshots of both end results you're currently seeing? I'm having a hard time visualizing a single board displaying swimlanes in different ways.

A screenshot of the board settings Swimlane configuration page would also be helpful.

[Rafael Hostettler]

see screenshot below and and also here: 

I just realised, that DT-63 is a story, and DT-74, 75, 83 and 84 are sub-tasks. So in this project (company managed), it's wrapping sub-tasks in stories. Whereas in the other projects (team managed), it's wrapping stories into epics and sub-tasks are not visible. 

I guess the question is now: is there a way to make this behaviour consistent?

[Rafael Hostettler]

I've changed the filter to not contain any sub-tasks in the hope it would switch the behaviour, but this was not the case. Since we mostly work with Stories, I'd prefer having epics that wrap stories/tasks with sub-tasks hidden. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Jumping over to this thread from my original response because what you've posted here now gives me clarity into your situation.

The "wrapping" that you are seeing is based on the parent/child relationship of the issues. When an issues parent is recorded in the field named Parent, then you see the wrapping behavior.

For Team Managed projects, the Parent field is used to store the issue ID for the parent of a Sub-task. It is also used to store the issue ID for the parent Epic of a Story/Task.

In a Company Managed project, the Parent field is used to store the issue ID for the parent of a Sub-task. The Parent field is NOT used to store the parent Epic of a Story/Task. Instead, in a Company Managed project, the Epic Link field is used to store the parent Epic of a Story/Task.

In this type of board you will not be able to get the wrapping behavior for Epics/Stories that are from a Company Managed project.

[Rafael Hostettler]

Thank you very much. As unfortunate and questionable a design decision this is, the explanation is clear and I guess I'll have to live with it. Again, thanks for taking the time to explain this.