Separating Jira Kanban board issues into categories?

Question

So im going to be using Jira for a client specifically for the Kanban board. I want to keep it as simple as possible (Simple Card Detail/Small amount of swimlanes/etc...)

My one question is: Outside of epics, is there any way to "split" up the issue categories and how they show on the board.

For example Feature Requests vs Support issues vs Bugs etc... (Not really sure how granular to get here) but hopefully the idea makes sense. Im afraid the client will get overwhelmed seeing just a big list of cards in the backlog without a "Visual" way of how they are split up.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are a couple of different approaches you can consider for this.

Firstly using swimlanes: JIRA allows you to create swimlanes that are based on a JQL query.

So you can have, for example, a swimlane that contains:

issuetype = bug

and another:

issuetype = task

and so on for the various issue types you are interested in.

Note that because you are using JQL this is very flexible. So you could even create swimlanes using custom fields or labels.

The second approach is to use quick filters instead of swimlanes. Each quick filter you add will have a corresponding button on the board. When clicked, that button will only show issues that match the filter.

Once again it uses JQL, so can be keyed to issuetype, custom fields, labels or anything else you like.

Answer 2

You could configure different types of issues.

You can have User Stories, Bugs, but also add Support issues, document issues etc. in your kanban board

But I would highly recommend you not to use several types of issues, because that could be confusing and will derivate many rules to determine what type of issue you should raise in every specific situation.

You should be careful about what will help your team visually on the board, and what will give you good statistics.