JIRA, Scrum, Full Stack: JIRA: Board

What is a Jira board?
If agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development, then an agile board is a tool that helps teams plan, visualize, and manage that work. In Jira, the board displays a selection of issues in columns, with each column representing a step in your team’s workflow for taking work through completion. A board accompanies each Jira project by default and provides the team with a shared view of all work that hasn't started, work that is in progress, and work that is completed.

Your board can be found in the sidebar navigation under “Board”.

How does a board differ from a project in Jira?
A Jira project houses the collection of all issues that need to be completed to achieve a particular goal. A Jira board, on the other hand, is the tool used to manage those issues as they move from creation to completion.

Boards are flexible tools that can be used variety of ways depending on the team’s unique way of working. For example:

Teams that practice scrum use the board to display a prioritized selection of issues that the team has committed to complete within a sprint, or time-boxed period. Issues outside of this selection can be found in the backlog.

Teams that practice kanban use the board as their work management tool for all issues, moving each issue through the columns from creation to completion.

Teams with larger projects or multiple workstreams use multiple or cross-project boards to more easily track and manage different types of work.

Create quick filters for your board

Quick filters let you further filter the issues on your board. Your board comes with one pre-configured quick filter for Only my issues, and you can create more using Jira Query Language (JQL).

You must be a Jira admin, project admin or board admin to create quick filters.

Any quick filters you create will appear in the Quick filters dropdown menu on the board for anyone who uses the board.

1. From your board select More actions (...), then Configure board.

2. Select Quick filters in the settings menu.

3. Select Create quick filter.

4. Enter a name, a JQL query and a description.

5. Select Create.

Examples

Show all issues that have the highest priority:

1 priority = Highest

Show all issues that have been updated in the past day:

1 updatedDate >= -1d

Get started with boards

A board helps you visualize work and track the status of issues as they move through a workflow. It helps you see at a glance work yet to be started, work in progress, and work completed.

Each issue is represented by a card that you can move between columns on the board. Columns on your board are typically represented by the work processes your team follows. Your board comes with three default columns with a global status of To do, In progress, and Done.

Easily drag your cards throughout the workflow to columns that reflect the relevant status. Cards in the first column on your board are always categorized as To do, whilst cards in the last column of your board are always categorized as Done.

Add a board to your project

To add a board to any of your current service projects:

From your service project, select Project settings, then Features.

Use the toggle to enable Board under Feature lab.

Customize your board

To customize the columns in a board:

1. From the navigation on the left, select Board.
2. Select More (...), then select Board settings.
3. Make your desired changes to columns.

To edit statuses on individual workflows:

1. From your service project, select Project settings, then Workflows.

Manage board columns and statuses

At its most basic, a column represents the current status of an issue. The default columns of a board are To Do, In Progress, and Done.

As your team’s workflow matures, you may start to introduce more statuses to your team’s working process. To help organize and discuss your team’s work, you can assign multiple statuses to a single column, reducing the number of columns your team uses when moving cards across your board.  

You can add, delete, rename, or move these columns if you wish. You can also choose which workflow status or statuses each column is mapped to, and whether any constraints apply to each column.

You must be a project admin to make changes to your columns and statuses.

Edit which statuses are mapped to specific columns

1. Go to your board.
2. Select More (...), then Configure board.
3. Under Map statuses to columns, you can edit which statuses are mapped to specific columns.
   1. To map a status to a column, drag and drop the status from the Unmapped statuses panel to the appropriate column.
   2. To change which column a status is mapped to, drag and drop the status to the new column.
   3. To unmap a status so issues with that status won’t appear on your board, drag and drop the status to the Unmapped statuses panel.

Set column constraints
Setting constraints on columns can help ensure that work is continually flowing through the pipeline. You can specify constraints for all columns, or just some of them.

Constraints trigger a visual indicator when a minimum or maximum number of issues appear in a column. On the board view, if a column constraint is exceeded, then the column header will change color, as follows:

• Red column header — maximum number of issues exceeded
• Yellow column header — minimum number of issues not met

The values of the column constraints will appear at the top of each column you set them for. These values don't have any impact on the number of issues displayed in the columns.

Column constraints apply to the total number of issues in a column, regardless of whether issues are hidden by a quick filter.

To set column constraints of a board:

1. Go to your board.
2. Select More (...), then Configure board.
3. In the Set a constraint dropdown list select either Issue count or Issue count, excluding subtasks.
4. Under a column’s name, enter a minimum or maximum value.
5. To remove a constraint, clear the existing value.