YouTrack Server
 

Balance Your Team's Workload

Last modified: 07 February 2025

An agile board in YouTrack doesn't have to conform to any specific methodology. Many teams here at JetBrains use agile boards to manage work that isn't related to the development of a single product.

Our Design team produces graphics and artwork for multiple products and projects. Their issues track design requests for JetBrains websites, product icons, logos, print materials, advertising campaigns, t-shirts, and more. They have a continuous flow of incoming tasks, coming from every product team.

Here's what this board looks like in our YouTrack installation:

Assignee board

This team uses this board as a tool for balancing the workload for each designer. Their process is as follows:

  • They add new issues to the current sprint automatically. New issues appear in the swimlane for uncategorized cards. This swimlane is shown at the top of the board. The team leads review and assign new requests that appear in this swimlane.

  • For swimlanes, they use values from the Assignee field. This creates a separate swimlane for each member of the team. Each designer can see the tasks that are assigned to them as well as every other member of the team. To focus on their own tasks, designers can collapse the other swimlanes on the board.

  • The team leads see the bigger picture, including all the incoming tasks and how current assignments are balanced between the team members. This helps them decide who can take a new task and see who might be overwhelmed at the moment.

  • As all issues are added to the board automatically, the team doesn't have to work with a backlog.

This type of board can be useful for any team that manages tasks that can be performed by multiple employees with similar skill sets.

There are a few features on the board that aren't used at all:

  • Backlog — with the option to add new issues to the sprint enabled, the design team doesn't keep a backlog. New issues appear on the board automatically and are assigned to a designer shortly after they are reported.

    If you have unresolved issues in an existing project that you want to migrate to the board, create a saved search that contains these issues and use this saved search as a backlog. Once you’ve moved all the issues from the backlog to the board, you can collapse the backlog and forget about it.

  • Charts — our design team doesn't work with charts on the board. If you’re looking to build a board that’s similar to this one, you can pick whichever chart suits your style.