Improved sub-filter for Jira Kanban boards

If you are using releases and Kanban boards in Jira, then you will most likely have a problem with issues not showing on the Kanban board. Specifically, issues are hidden if that have been released but their status is something other than “Done”. This can easily happen as Jira does not check if all issues are done before executing the release. The problem is the Kanban board sub-filter:

fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is EMPTY

This means that if the release version of an issue is set then it will be hidden as soon as the release is made in Jira regardless of the issue’s status. From the team’s perspective this is probably perfectly fine, these issues were done in practice it was just that there status was incorrect in Jira. In the worst case real work is hidden. Another problem is that even if the work is done, leaving the issues open skews the data Jira relies for the various graphs and metrics that it provides, e.g. team velocity.

To fix this, what we want is to only hide issues that are released and have status “Done”. To do this we update the filter to:

(fixVersion in releasedVersions() AND status != Done) OR
fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is EMPTY

Now all issues are displayed until the team actually sets the status to “Done”, which is the more intuitive behaviour. And if the release has been made before the status is set to “Done” then the issue will disappear immediately from the Kanban board.

Expect that old issues will reappear on the board when the filter is applied, but this doesn’t take long to clean up. Alternatively the filter above can be used to search for these old issues and close them first, but it is probably easier and better to let the developers do it themselves.

References

JIRA Software Kanban board does not show all Issues.