By default, your agile board will display all issues. For Scrum, it will be all issues in the sprint, and for Kanban, it will be all issues that have not been released. This can be quite distracting when you have many issues and only want to focus on specific ones. While swimlanes can help with that, having too many issues on the board can still be very noisy.
One useful feature Jira has is that you can create a number of predefined filters for your board. With these, you can quickly filter out the issues you do not care about and only have the issues that matter to you shown on the board. Note that this means that the other issues aren't removed from the board—they are simply hidden from view.
Jira already comes with two built-in quick filters, called Only My Issues and Recently Updated. You can create your own by following these steps:
- Browse to your project's agile board
- Click on the Board menu and select the Configure option
- Select the Quick Filters option from the left navigation panel
- Enter a name for the new filter and the JQL query that will return the filtered issues
In the following screenshot, we are creating a new filter called Customer Requests and using the JQL to search for issues with the Source field set to Customer:
After you have added your new filter, it will be displayed next to the existing ones, ordered alphabetically. Clicking on the filter will immediately filter out the issues that do not fit the criteria. You can also chain filter the issues by selecting multiple filters, as shown in the following screenshot. Note that this is combining the selected filters using an AND, not OR. We have enabled both the Customer Requests and Recently Updated filters so that we can get a view on recently updated customer requests:
