Boards

Kanban and scrum boards with columns, limits and drag and drop.

A board shows tickets as cards in columns, one column per group of statuses. Boards draw from one or more projects, or from every project you can see when they have no project filter.

Kinds of board

• Kanban boards show all matching tickets and suit continuous flow.
• Scrum boards show one sprint at a time and have a backlog for planning.

Finding a board

The boards page lists every board for projects you can see, with its kind, number, the projects it draws from, how many columns it has and who owns it. The search box (or the f key) narrows the list by name, number or project key, My boards keeps only the boards you own, and the order can be by name or newest first. Twenty boards are shown at a time, with Previous and Next under the list, and the filters and page are part of the page address.

Swimlanes

A ticket with sub-tasks gets a lane of its own on the board, headed by the parent with its key, summary, status and how many of its cards are done. Its sub-tasks are the cards in that lane; the parent is the heading, so it is not also a card and does not count against a column's work-in-progress limit. An epic with tickets under it works the same way. The heading is selectable like a card: click it, or step onto it with j and k, and the parent's page opens in the panel on the right. Everything that is neither a parent nor somebody's child sits in the last lane.

Cards move between columns within their own lane, since moving to another lane would mean changing what the ticket belongs to. A board with no sub-tasks anywhere looks exactly as it did: one lane, no headings.

A lane can be collapsed with the arrow before its heading, and so can the last lane (Other tickets) once there are others; Collapse all and Expand all sit beside the board's other controls. A collapsed lane keeps its heading and shows, in each column holding any of its cards, a stack with how many there are; click a stack, or the arrow again, to open the lane. Cards in a collapsed lane cannot be dragged until it is open. Which lanes you collapsed is yours alone: it is kept with your account for each board, so the board looks the same when you come back, on any device, and nobody else's view changes. A link that selects a ticket, such as the board icon on the home page, opens the ticket's lane, and collapsing the lane of the card you have open closes the card.

When you move the last card in a lane into a done column, the lane offers to close its parent as well, with the workflow transition that would do it. Accept or ignore it; the offer goes away either way. The same offer appears on a ticket's own page when you finish the last sub-task there.

Swimlanes can be turned off per board in its settings, which puts every ticket back in one flat board. Boards imported from Jira follow the swimlane strategy they had: Jira's story swimlanes become these lanes, and other strategies start flat.

Collapsing columns

A column can be collapsed too, with the arrow before its name, to keep the board to the columns you are working in. A collapsed column keeps its place and its width, so the other columns stay where they were: its heading and count stay, and in every swimlane its cards give way to how many there are. Click the arrow again to open the column. The count is of the cards the board shows, so on the done column it leaves out the done tickets the board leaves off, and the heading still says how many those are, with the link to them in search.

A collapsed column is still somewhere to drop a card: drop one on it and the ticket moves into the column's status, as with an open column, and the count goes up. As with lanes, which columns you collapsed is yours alone and kept with your account for each board, on any device; a link that selects a ticket in a collapsed column opens the column for the moment, and collapsing the column of the card you have open closes the card.

Creating a board

Press New board on the boards page. Give it a name and kind, tick the projects it draws from, and arrange the columns. A new board starts with To do, In progress and Done columns filled from the status categories; add, remove, reorder and rename columns as you like, choose which statuses each column holds, and set work-in-progress limits. A minimum or maximum on a column highlights its count when that is outside the range, over the maximum or under the minimum, and shows the limits beside it (3/2–5). A minimum cannot be more than the maximum.

Estimation field names a number field of the board's projects that holds each ticket's estimate, such as story points; with one chosen, the sprint reports can count points instead of tickets. Administrators add such fields under Custom fields.

Done tickets stay for decides how long a finished ticket stays on the board: 7, 14 or 28 days after it was resolved, or always. A done ticket with no resolution date counts from when it last changed status, and one that has never changed status, such as a ticket imported already done, from when it was created. A kanban board starts at 14 days, as in Jira, and boards that existed before the setting did were given 14 days too; a scrum board keeps them always, since completing a sprint takes its done tickets away. Older done tickets leave the board rather than piling up in the done column, and the done column's heading says how many were left off, with a link to them in search. A board imported from Jira keeps its "hide completed issues older than" setting.

Members can create a board for any projects they can see; customers cannot make boards. Only administrators may leave the projects empty, which makes a board for everything. The board's owner and administrators can change its settings later from the Settings button.

Using the board

New ticket in the header opens the ticket dialog and asks which project; on a board for one project, New ticket in the left-edge menu opens it with that project chosen.

Cards and the detail panel

Cards show the key, type, summary, assignee and labels; a deal's card in a sales pipeline adds its company, its value and its expected close. The priority is the colour of the card's left edge rather than a word: red for the highest, orange for high, brass for medium, green for low and grey for the lowest or none (a priority imported from Jira keeps the colour it had there); hold the pointer over a card and its priority is named. Click a card to select it: the ticket's key is added to the page address and a panel on the right shows the ticket page itself, so you can comment, run a transition, assign, attach files, link tickets and log work without leaving the board. Clicking another card replaces the panel's contents; the × in the panel's corner or the Escape key closes it, and Open in the panel's top bar goes to the ticket's own page. Because the key is in the address, a link to the board with a ticket in it (such as the board icon beside a ticket on the home page) opens the board with that card selected, outlined and scrolled into view; for a ticket on a scrum board's backlog rather than in its active sprint, the link goes to the backlog and outlines the ticket's row there.

Filtering the cards

The box at the top of the board (or the f key) narrows the cards to those that match what you type, as you type: a ticket's key, words of its summary, its labels or the name of the person it is assigned to, in any mix of capitals. Several words must all match, so anna login finds Anna's tickets about logging in. A swimlane whose parent matches keeps all its cards; any other lane shows only its matching cards and is left out when none match. Each column's count then says how many of its cards are shown and how many it holds (2 of 7), and its work-in-progress limits still count them all. When nothing matches, the board says so, with a link that shows every card again; so does emptying the box.

The filter works on the cards the board already shows, so it never brings back done tickets the board leaves off or tickets you may not see. It is part of the page address, so a filtered board can be shared as a link and stays filtered when you reload it, and cards that others add or change appear only if they match. Cards can still be dragged while the board is filtered; a card dropped between two shown cards lands between them.

Dragging cards

Drag a card to another column to move the ticket into that column's status. While you drag, the card leaves its column and travels with the pointer, and the card you are about to land in front of slides down to open a space the size of the card you are dragging, drawn as a dashed box, so the column looks as it will after the drop before you let go. Dropping below the last card or into an empty column shows the box there instead.

As soon as you pick a card up, the columns its workflow lets it reach stay bright and the others fade; a drop on a faded column does nothing. When several transitions could get there, the first one you are allowed to run is used. If the transition asks for something, such as a resolution, a dialog opens for it and nothing changes until you confirm; Cancel, Esc or a click outside the dialog leaves the card where it was. The Default workflow allows every transition from any status, so on a new installation a card can go to any column; a workflow imported from Jira keeps its own transitions and its boards behave as they did in Jira. Ask an administrator to add transitions to the workflow if you need more freedom.

Dragging within a column reorders the cards, and the order is kept on the backlog too.

Moving a card without dragging

Select a card (click it, or reach it with j and k) and run one of the transitions shown in the panel on the right: the ticket takes the new status and its card appears in that status's column.

Tickets that are on no column

Tickets whose status is in no column stay off the board. A note above the columns says how many there are and links the board's owner to the settings to add a column for them.

Sprint reports

Reports on a scrum board (or the 3 key) opens two charts. The burndown for one sprint shows, for each day from the sprint's start to its end, how much work was still open at the end of that day, against a dotted line of even progress; the shaded area is the sprint's size, which rises when tickets are added mid-sprint. Pick the sprint at the top; the active one is shown first. Velocity shows the last completed sprints side by side: an outline for what each held when it started and a filled bar for how much was done when it was completed. Both count tickets, or points when the board has an estimation field and you switch the toggle. Only tickets you may see are counted. Status is taken from each ticket's history, so a ticket finished on the last day and reopened later still shows as done in that sprint.

Sprints on a scrum board

A scrum board shows the active sprint by default. The sprint selector at the top switches to another sprint or to all tickets. Sprints are created, started and completed on the backlog page.

Next to the sprint's name the board shows how much time is left: days, or hours on the last day, with a bar of the time elapsed when the sprint has both a start and an end. A sprint past its end date is marked overdue, a future sprint shows when it starts, and a completed sprint shows when it was closed. The figure is as of when the page was opened or last changed.