Epic swimlanes in board MVC Proposal
Problem to Solve
In an effort to expand our support for popular Kanban practices and use cases, we are adding in the first swimlane functionality for our Issue Boards via Epic Swimlanes.
As a user of Issue Boards,
I need to be able to group work on my issue board by Epic,
So I can clearly see how a specific Epic's issues are progressing through our workflow
- Boards will have a Swimlane option that can be toggled on/off
- Epic swimlanes are displayed automatically (not individually configured)
- Swimlanes logic: Group issues together in a swimlane that are assigned to the same Epic.
Current Wireframe and Iteration Sequencing
See #215537 (closed)
Interested Customer Notes:
"Epic Swimlanes would help us reduce our label usage/noise, on the left of a board, we want to group the issues in workflow columns by the Epic they belong to. Under Milestones I have issues, those issues grouped to Epics on a board. I need the tools to call out an epic swimlane, not with a label." $250k+ CAR account
"Asking for this feature as well. I honestly can't think of any good reasons why swimlanes should not be part of an agile toolkit. This is core functionality in Jira and most other competitors and one of the major difficulties with trying to defend using Gitlab for leadership" #7371 (comment 191128059)
"Another feature which I sorely miss, which are admittedly difficult to implement, are swimlanes/rows in issue boards. They would provide an entirely new dimension of possibilities."
All in all, I love using Gitlab, but it also frustrates me greatly, since my main use is for its VCS and planning capabilities, and the latter is in a weird state, which leaves me with no choice but to wait." Hacker News comment
Internal Use Cases and User Notes
PM building a Milestone Planning Board, where each column is an upcoming Milestone, and they'd like to cut the board horizontally by Epic :
"I also upvoted this issue - I started using Epics heavily at GitLab and currently my Plan Board contains issues from around 2-3 epics. Epic swimlanes would be a massive improvement and I would really love to see this feature!" #7371 (comment 194746521)
PM looking to track how an Epic's issues is progressing across a board :
"I found it difficult to take advantage of epics on the planning boards. The power of epics in managing the backlog and the portfolio is to bo able to group issues into larger items. However, the boards do not make it easy to see this relationship. I have to click on each individual item, note the epic and then click on the next one and so fort, which makes it impractical to relate issues belonging to the same epi to each other. What would be helpful is an indication of the epic on the issues card, or the ability to have swimlanes on the boards for each epic, so that I can easily see/identify how my epics are doing on the board" #7371 (comment 285715420)
Competitive Notes
JIRA Next Gen supports "swimlane" functionality via a "Group By" option on their boards which automatically groups issues by the variable chosen:
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