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Swimlanes

What are Swimlanes in Kanban Workflow and How to Use Them?

Alexander Sergeev avatar
Written by Alexander Sergeev
Updated over 5 years ago

If you know what Kanban is all about in general, then it's time to learn more about the methodology's details.

Knowing how to edit Kanban workflow and use all its opportunities will help to get better results.

One of these opportunities is applying special columns - Swimlanes. What are Swimlanes and how to use them?

Introducing Swimlanes

Kanban Swimlanes are horizontal columns on a board that offer a great way to manage a number of similar projects, bringing an overview all in one place. This leaves you the ability to concentrate on just one issue.

Adding Swimlanes, you may visualize the work status that supports different service-level classes. It's possible to create a Swimlane to represent any other dimension, which supports your tracking needs.

With the help of Hygger, you are able to collapse every column or Swimlane. You may leave only these that you are working in so that you have a concise view only of info that is relevant to you.

What are Swimlanes for?

Swimlanes are used to separate different kinds of issues that team members use. With their help, teams can easily visualize which issues they should work on next. 

The examples of using Swimlanes:

  • grouping the tasks based on their priority (Blockers, medium, low priority, etc.)

  • grouping the tasks based on their type (Bugs, customer feedback, feature requests, etc.)

  • grouping the tasks based on their assignee (separate Swimlanes for every team member)

  • grouping the tasks based on department (Development, QA, Design, etc.)

How to implement Swimlanes with Hygger? 

To add a Swimlane to your workflow open Menu section on the right part of your board and click Create Swimlane.

Hygger suggests

Dive deeply into more Kanban methodology terms:

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