Swimlanes by issue across sprints

I'd like to create swimlanes agile boards by issues with Type = "User story". This works great, I add an issue and all its subtasks to the board, swimlane appears, all subtasks of that User story appear in that swimlane.

The problem is that when I move one of the subtasks to the next sprint, it will appear in "Uncategorized". The parent User story is still part of the previous sprint. Of course, I can move the User story to the next sprint too, but that seems bit burdensome and it will "uncategorize" all the tasks in the old sprint.

Is there a way how to solve that?

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

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8 comments
Official comment

Hi!

I'm Sergey from the Youtrack team.

In this case, you set that swimlanes are based on the issues. In other words, a swimlane is some issue on your board. This issue has subtasks that are added to the swimlane as the cards. 

When you move only a subtask to a new sprint, it doesn't have a swimlane it needs to be assigned to per your settings. Thus it's dropped in the 'Uncategorized Cards' swimlane, which is default for the cards that don't have a swimlane. 

So what you need is to move the parent task to the new sprint, which will create a swimlane that the subtasks can be put into. Please learn more about how to plan a sprint in our documentation.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. 


 

Hi Sergey, many thanks for getting back to me. What you describe is exactly what I observed and tried say in my post. The problem I have is that once you move the parent issue into new sprint, the subtask issues that have been completed in the previous sprint become uncategorized. Usually, we are not able to finish a User story in a single sprint, so we have to move it several times and then, when we review the old sprint, all tasks are on one big pile of uncategorized cards.

I understand that an issue -- including the parent issue -- can only be at one sprint at any one time and therefore the problem I have cannot be solved. It would be cool, though if the board worked in a different way, where I could create swimlanes based on parent tasks even when these parent tasks are not part of the sprint.

To clarify: with such a setting, when I add a task to a sprint, YouTrack would check if this task has a parent issue and if yes, YouTrack would create a swimlane named after that parent issue. Should I create a feature request in your issue tracker?

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Thanks for your reply. 

I agree that it'd be useful for your case, but there are many other cases when users explicitly want to have their issues in the uncategorized swimlane. So such a change would bring a lot of ambiguity. The point is that if you have an option to do it yourself and can expect a specific result, we don't want to interrupt it making it less expected. Given this situation, we won't consider this kind of functionality for now, I'm afraid. 

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I am sorry I have not been able to express myself more clearly.

Currently, there is setting "Swimlanes are identified by:" and it has three values: "No Swimlanes", "Values" and "Issues". What I propose is to have a fourth option, "Parent". When user selects this value, tasks with the same parent issue will be in the same swimlane and the name of the swimlane would be the summary of that parent issue.

 

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Thanks for your reply! 

I might be missing something, but swimlanes identified by an issue already work this way. With this setting, it has a parent-subtask relation. I assume the only difference would be that if the subtask is added, it would create a swimlane of the parent issue, while currently you need to add the parent issue first. As for how tasks are added to the board in the first place, it's based on the board behavior settings.

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Thank you for your comment, I think we are getting to the crux of the matter.

Swimlanes identified by an issue only work in this manner when the parent issue itself belongs to the same sprint. That is the problem I am trying to solve in this thread. If agile boards work as I suggested, the parent issue would be able to create swimlanes in several sprints simultaneously, and that's the whole point of the suggestion.

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Thanks for your reply. 

I believe I found a feature request that, as it seems to me, describes the same feature: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-41676 (specifically the additional description in the comment). Please feel free to vote for it, as it increases its priority. To do so, sign in to Jetbrains Youtrack: https://take.ms/VdP6I (screenshot). You may also post a comment about your main point there. Thanks. 

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This is exactly what we need, it's quite surprising that it doesn't have this option already. The last two messages from Martin Klima are perfect.

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