Use kanban-style workflow boards in Aha! Develop to pull in and manage your team's work. This makes it easy to visualize the status of work by individual, team, status, or custom swimlane.
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Overview
The workflow board can function as either a kanban or scrum board, depending on whether your team is using sprints.
If you follow a kanban approach, you can easily pull work onto the board with the Import sidebar.
If your team uses iterations, you will only see work assigned to the active sprint on a workflow board. You can pull in more using the Import or Backlog sidebar.
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If you are an Advanced plan customer and have integrated your Aha! Develop account with Aha! Roadmaps, you can also pull work from the Prioritized backlog, or navigate to an Aha! Roadmaps workspace and pull work directly into your workflow board.
If you are an Advanced plan customer and want to disable the Prioritized backlog so that your team pulls work directly from the Import or Backlog sidebars, you can disable it in Settings ⚙️ -> Team -> Configure -> Backlog management.
No matter your set up, the workflow board visualizes your team's work so that you can track progress and pinpoint bottlenecks.
To access a workflow board, navigate to Work → My board or Work → Team board. Any user in your Aha! Develop account with at least contributor user permissions can add and manage work on the workflow boards.
There are two workflow boards to choose from. Click the Board type buttons at the top left of a board to switch between the views:
My board shows work assigned to you by status. This way you can track your own work.
Team board shows work assigned to every member of your team grouped in swimlanes by assignee. This way you can track what each team member is progressing on in one view — including work that is not yet assigned.
Use the tag and epics filters at the top of the page for a more focused view of a workflow board.
Enable backlog management
The backlog management page helps you organize and define work before your team commits to it. Since work can come to your team through a variety of sources — importers, Aha! Roadmaps, and records you create yourself — it can be helpful to see it in one place so you know your team is always working on the most valuable items.
Whether your team prefers sprints or kanban, you can use backlog management to focus your workflow board. To do this, navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Team -> Configure -> Backlog management.
Scrum teams will need to enable backlog management to use sprints. They can use the workflow board to see all work in the current sprint — or pull in more work from importers, the backlog, or the prioritized backlog.
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Kanban teams can choose whether to enable backlog management.
If enabled, your team can access backlog management and pull records from various sources into the Prioritized backlog. The workflow board will only show records you pull onto the board.
If disabled, your team will not be able to access backlog management. All records assigned to your team will appear on the workflow board.
Customize your board
Customize your boards to match your team's workflow. You will need to be an administrator with customizations permissions to do this.
Every user on your team uses the same workflow board, so any changes you make to it will affect every member of your team. If multiple teams use the same workflow, then changes you make to your board will affect those teams' boards as well. Navigate to Settings ⚙️→ Account → Statuses and workflows to see which teams use your workflow.
To reorder a status, click and drag it to a new location.
To rename a status, click on the More options button at the top of the column, then Edit status.
To delete a status, click on the More options button at the top of the column, then Delete status.
To add a new status, scroll to the far-right side of the page and click Add column +.
To set a work in progress limit, click on the More options button at the top of a column, then Set column limit.
To remove a work in progress limit, click on the More options button at the top of the column, then Remove column limit.
Change board view
As an individual user, you can collapse or expand individual status columns, then save and share that board view with any one on your team.
Click on any status column's chevron to Collapse or Expand it. Collapsed columns are not deleted, just hidden.
You can also customize the layout of the workflow board's record cards by clicking the Customize view dropdown.
First, customize the cards on the board by clicking Customize card layout. This option allows you to customize the layout for Epics, Features, or Requirements in either Expanded or Collapsed views. The customizations you make will be unique to you and not impact other users in your team.
Click the View buttons on the right to see how the card will display in an Expanded or Collapsed view.
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Click the gear dropdown ⚙️ for further customizations:
For features and requirements, click the toggle to show or hide the record's Parent record on the card.
Choose whether you want the card's color to highlight its workflow status. Your options are Background, Sidebar (leaving the background white), Time in status, or None.
Select the fields you want to add to the card layout. If you have a lot of available fields, use the Search at the top of the tab to find the one you need. You can also collapse Standard fields or Custom fields to show only one type of field.
Drag and drop fields onto a card to add them. Click the X beside a field to remove it.
You can drop fields next to others on the same row or beneath the bottom row of fields to create a new row on the layout.
Add a Divider line anywhere on the card layout to better organize key data.
Click Reset to default to revert your changes to the default layout, Cancel to exit the modal or Save to save your work.
Next, customize the workflow board itself.
From the Customize view dropdown, choose whether you want to show Empty swimlanes for a more complete picture of your workflow, or hide them for a more focused view of work in progress.
Use the Group by dropdown to control how you want to display cards on the workflow board.
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Click the Plus + button to add additional filters to your board:
Tags
Epics
Record type
Days in status
Users
Click the Save view button on the right to save your view.
Add work
Work moves from left to right across a workflow board. If your team uses sprints, you will see the Backlog sidebar on the left and can pull work from it. All teams will see the Import sidebar.
If you are an Aha! Develop Advanced plan customer and want to disable the Prioritized backlog so that your team pulls work directly from the Import or Backlog sidebars, you can disable it in Settings ⚙️ -> Team -> Configure -> Backlog management.
Click Import on the left to expand the Import sidebar and pull work items from other sources.
Aha! Roadmaps, available for accounts that have connected with Aha! Roadmaps, shows you a list of all Aha! Roadmaps workspaces you have access to. Select a workspace to see a list of that workspace's releases and every work item in each release. If you see something in there that should be assigned to your team, drag it into the middle of the backlog management page. Remember, in this integration product and engineering teams share the same work items — no need to map fields back and forth. Each team has unique statuses to match their unique workflows. Assigning a record to your team will not disturb the product team's release plan.
Aha! Roadmaps users can send work items to Aha! Develop by assigning records to an Aha! Develop team. They can also go a step further and send records to the bottom of the Prioritized backlog, the workflow board, or any sprint that has not yet started. They can then show the record location and prioritized backlog rank on a customized record card.
Aha! Ideas, available for all accounts that have connected with Aha! Roadmaps and have configured an Aha! Roadmaps workspace to allow ideas imports, shows you a list of all ideas associated with a workspace. Drag an idea your team wants to work on into your backlog or click the Filters button to filter the list of ideas by Status, ideas Category, or ideas Portal. When you do, that idea becomes a feature assigned to your team and retains a link back to the original idea so you can automatically update idea subscribers on your team's progress.
More applications, available to every Aha! Develop account, provides a list of importers (you can also build your own importer!). Use importers to copy work items one at a time into Aha! Develop and create them there as Aha! Develop records. For example, you may pull support tickets escalated to engineering support or decide to investigate persistent Sentry errors.
In addition to importing work, you can also create work directly on the workflow board.
Hover over a status on the board and click Add feature to create a feature quickly. You will need to have contributor user permissions for a given team to be able to create work on that team's board.
Click on any record you have just created to open its drawer view and add or adjust information.
Add swimlanes
The workflow board groups records in columns based on status by default. You can see all the work assigned to you (or your team) at a glance and how far it has progressed through its workflow.
For added visibility into your planned work, you can add horizontal swimlanes to your workflow board. To do this, navigate to a workflow board and select an option from the Group by dropdown. You can group work by the following standard and custom fields:
Standard fields:
None
Assignee
Epic
Feature
Release
Aha! Roadmaps workspace
Custom fields:
These custom field types guarantee that a record will never exist in more than one swimlane in the workflow board.
Predefined choice lists
Editable choice lists
You get more visibility into work in progress with swimlanes. This might inspire you to change how you manage the work assigned to your team (or yourself!). There a few details to note when managing work on a board with swimlanes enabled:
You can change any record's status by dragging it to a new status column.
If you have grouped records by Assignee, you can change a record's assignee by dragging it to a different swimlane.
If you have grouped records by a custom field, you can change the custom field value on a record by dragging it to a different swimlane. For example, if you have a predefined choice list custom field to indicate a record's urgency, you could drag a feature from Major to Critical to change that feature's urgency.
The swimlanes you add apply only to your specific user — so Group by selections you make to your Team board will not change anyone else's view.
Want to share your workflow board view? Click the Export button in the upper right corner of the board and export it as a static image (.png or .pdf), or, for accounts integrated with Aha! Roadmaps, you can add the view to an Aha! presentation.