Add Custom Swimlanes to Your Engineering Workflow Board in Aha! Develop

Group related work items together on your workflow board with swimlanes.

November 19, 2021

Add Custom Swimlanes to Your Engineering Workflow Board in Aha! Develop

by Jeff Tucker

The power of the workflow board in Aha! Develop is its flexibility. It allows you to choose how you view engineering work. You can toggle between team and individual views, visualize work in progress, and filter work by epics, users, and tags. And it is easy to move from one view to another to see the same work through a different lens.

Today you can customize the workflow board even further — by adding new swimlanes to group work the way you want.

With this enhancement, you can now add horizontal swimlanes — to group related work across the columns of your workflow board. For instance, you can create swimlanes based on standard fields or based on custom fields like priority and product type. Choose the new "Group by" option on the workflow board to create swimlanes tailored to how your team works.

Here are a few ways you can get started with swimlanes:

Group work by record type

Track progress across different types of work. Add swimlanes to group work by epics, releases, or features. In the example below, we are viewing work grouped by epic. We could share this view with leaders to show how work is progressing across strategic themes.

See all work-in-progress on the Team board, or view just the work assigned to you on My board.

See all work-in-progress on the Team board, or view just the work assigned to you on My board.

Highlight class of service

Let's imagine you want to view work based on how urgently it is needed. Here we created a custom field on the feature card with a predefined choice list: expedite, normal priority, and low priority. Now we can configure swimlanes to group work by priority — making it easier to spot work that needs to be addressed now.

Configure swimlanes using any editable or predefined choice list custom field.

Visualize work by product

If your team supports multiple products, you need to keep track of what is happening across each. If you are using Aha! Develop with Aha! Roadmaps, you can add swimlanes that group product work based on the Roadmaps workspace where it originated. This makes it easy to understand what your team is building for each product. Other work-in-progress will be grouped in a team swimlane — so you can visualize product and engineering priorities in a single view.

If you are not using an integrated account, create a custom field on your feature card with predefined choices for product type. Then you can use that field to configure a swimlane.

Here we configured the workflow board to show swimlanes based on Aha! Roadmaps workspaces and Aha! Develop teams.

Here we configured the workflow board to show swimlanes based on Aha! Roadmaps workspaces and Aha! Develop teams.

Viewing development work from multiple vantage points helps you deliver what you are accountable for.

Try adding swimlanes to your workflow board today. You will love the added visibility into your planned work. And however you choose to organize your workflow board, we would love to hear what works best for you.

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Jeff Tucker

Jeff Tucker

Jeff is passionate about promoting customer empathy throughout product and engineering teams. He is a senior product manager at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software. Jeff has more than 10 years of experience across product, design, and engineering roles. Previously, he managed products at developer tool and cybersecurity startups.

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