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Background - Kanban Boards

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Kanban (agile) boards are visual representations of a workflow (roughly translated to columns) and the tasks (cards) that follow that workflow.

Boards bin statuses into columns, each column can have one or more statuses. For example, "Open","Reopened", and "On Hold" could all be binned under a board's "To Do" column.

Kanban boards are populated by JIRA query language (JQL) saved searches (examples follow below) that tell the board what cards to display. Quick filters are optionally used to further refine the cards displayed. Swimlanes are a third implementation of this search language that bin cards into rows.

Background - JQL

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JIRA query language (JQL) is a syntax used to search for JIRA issues. Atlassian has an excellent full-length tutorial on JQL here, but some examples are as follows:

Example 1: Return all issues that were made in the LCSET project in the last five days

JQL Search: project = LCSET and created >= -5d

Example 2: Return all issues in the SRS project that are currently in progress

JQL Search: project = SRS and status = "In Progress"

A more complicated example - the JQL behind the SRS board (as of 2/2018) is the following, and is saved in a filter called "SRS Production".

Example 3: Return all issues that have no security level set and are in the projects LCSET, GAPREQ, PICO and XTR, and only if their status is Open. Exclude subtasks. Also show issues from the project SRS that do not have the status of Closed or Done, and don't show resolved SRS tickets that are older than 3 days.

JQL Search: level is EMPTY AND project in (LCSET, GAPREQ, PICO, XTR) AND type != Sub-task AND status in (open) OR project = "Sample Retrieval and Storage" AND (status not in (closed, done) OR resolved > -3d) ORDER BY Rank ASC

JQL on Kanban Boards

A board uses JQL in three places:

1) An initial search that populates the entire board (this is called a "Saved Filter")

2) Optionally, quick filters are possible to further refine the board.

3) Individual swimlanes to bin cards further.

When using agile boards, keep in mind that JIRA is running all these JQL queries in parallel when a board is loaded. This can have (and has had) performance issues for the instance as a whole.

Therefore it's important that process owners are careful about the work they are currently filtering if their board has a lot of swimlanes.

If any issue is captured by the main board filter (#1 above) but does not have a specific swimlane to be binned in, it will go to the default "Everything Else" lane.

Cards will bin in the first swimlane that matches their condition and will never appear twice on the same board.

Configuring Swimlanes

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