Add Swinlanes to better organize the job assignment

Feature Discussion
1

Hi,
I am new to Vikunj, first of all, congrats, its a beautiful an nice software, much better tham others open sources out there.

It will awesome to have swinlanes on the boars, not the horizontal ones, but the vertical, like that:

image
image993×550 56.4 KB

and block the edit of the board model, the user can only add tasks

2

Right now nothing like that is planned but open for PRs.

Should these swimlanes be manually edited (like buckets right now) or depend on some task value (like a specific label)?

You mean as a permission when sharing it?

3

Yes manually it can be manually edited, but it will be nice if have an atribute to identify in the api in what swinlane, maybe a specific label (sorry if this sound confusing)

Not only when sharing, sometimes we use a board for work, the type of buckets wont change, because is part of the processes of the bussines.

So it will be nice to have an option to block changes in buckets (and in the swinlanes if added) , like add, remove, change and change name.

4

I’ve worked on several projects at work where swimlanes were very useful. Jira has this feature and many other scrum/kanban/agile board implementations. Please have a look at KanbanFlow’s feature page for an example.

Vikunja’s buckets are the columns in the kanban view and swimlanes would be the rows. This would add another relationship: A task belongs to one bucket and to one swimlane. Both buckets and swimlanes need to be created before tasks could be assigned to them.

In a personal board I like to use swimlanes to group tasks in different contexts like work, some project, household, finances etc. At work I’ve seen things like “fast lanes” for critical bugs above a lane with regular tasks. You could also use separate swimlanes for different teams.

5

At work we use swimlanes to create a separation between urgent tasks, external orders, and internal tasks. All tracked under the same “Active” column, but collected into separate rows for the different priorities.

Our current setup is quite a bit more complex though, as we also have sub-columns on some of the rows - with per-team task limits on them - in order to effectively handle all our tasks.
We even end up using swimlanes in the backlog, to separate external orders, internal tasks, and low-effort internal tasks (for quality-day purposes).

6

Just to get this right:

Is the swimlanes feature for you similar to grouping the tasks by a certain property (visualized by vertical separation)?

Or do you expect even more advanced features, like our current filters.

If it‘s about the grouping in might be of interest to implement that grouping feature for all views and not only for kanban.

7

I’ve been looking for any progress updates related to this feature, so came here to ask.
Is this feature planned to be implemented?

We’re currently really missing the option to visually separate ongoing issues within a project without completely hiding a bunch of them. Swimlanes would help out a bunch!

If left unanswered before, here’s my attempt to explain what’s needed for this feature;
Its best described Here, as well as some images to help visualize the implementation. Basically have horizontal lanes of separation based on selection of e.g. Assignee, Epic, Sprint, Story, Priority or Tag / Label.
Some of these are not present in Vikunja, but thats no problem. There’s still tools available to the user that would allow manual separation based on the utilities that are already available.

8

I would be keen to implement this feature! @kolaente stated above in 2022 that PRs are welcome, i hope that still stands. Will take me some weeks to find the time though.

I’ve been using payed kanban apps for years and vikunja fits into all my criteria, except i really need kanban swimlanes.

My proposal for a first proove of concept, from which we can iteratively improve:

  • Add some fields to project settings, that allow you to enable swmilanes for kanban and select by which criteria the tasks should be sorted to the lanes. As the kanban view has no own settings menu yet, i assume the project settings are the right place for this.
    • Selectable splitting Criteria for the PoC:
      • Priority → One Swimlane per Priority
      • Label → One Swimlane per Label, if multiple are applied, first is used (didn’t check yet if they are stored in order, if not we’ll need another solution)
      • User - One lane per assigned User, same caveat as with Label
      • Repeating → One lane for tasks that have repition enabled, one for thoose that don’t
  • Add to Kanban UI, that the Swimlane Feature is respected, i.e.:
    • Show lanes when feature is enbaled
    • Sort tasks into lanes
    • Make drag and drop adhere lanes, for the PoC moving between lanes should be blocked. Later it would be great if moving to another lane automatically assignes the lane critieria. I.e. dragging a task from low-prio to high-prio lane should change the priority.
    • Sure enough more adjustments that will appear along the way

My ultimate goal would be, to have custom lane-split criteria, i.e. configuring that one lane takes all prio-high tasks with label x, another one all assigned to user z with label y and so on. But thats something for a later iteration.

Any comments, improvements or things i might have missed are welcome :slight_smile: