Jira

Swimlanes: A new way to group work on business boards

Business boards in Jira now group work in horizontal swimlanes, while columns stay fixed to status. It has been generally available on Atlassian Cloud since 13 Aug 2026.

Generally available since 13 Aug 2026
Medium impact

Read Atlassian's release note See every change

What it is

Improvement

Grouping by assignee, category and priority moves from columns to swimlanes on business boards. Columns now always show status. Epic and Subtask are new grouping options, and empty swimlanes are hidden.

Users

Members choose a grouping from the Group by menu, and drag work items between swimlanes to update field values or between columns to change status.

Admins

Reordering status columns is now a space admin-only setting.

Written from Atlassian's release note and checked against it automatically. Atlassian's original stays the source of truth.

Where the rollout is

First published 7 May 2026 Done
Rollout starts 12 May 2026 Done
Generally available 13 Aug 2026 Done

What changed

7 May 2026 First published by Atlassian

Atlas Bench began tracking Atlassian Cloud on 29 Oct 2026. Changes before that date are not in this history.

Source Atlassian's release note Read it on the Atlassian Community

Related changes

Where it lands

Where this change sits on the Stack

Every change is sorted onto the layer it touches first. This one lands on Identity and Access.

Agents and Automation

Rovo, Agents in Jira, Forge, MCP with Claude and Copilot, agent lifecycle, usage and cost governance.

Atlassian Anthropic

Governance and Change

Permission architecture, audit and compliance, ITSM and change control, change management, strategic reporting and budgets.

Atlassian Guard Jira Service Management Strategy Collection Jira Align

Platform and Migration

Migration of every kind, tool consolidation, licensing, standardization, the system of work.

Atlassian Miro AWS Azure

Identity and Access

Human and non-human identity, SSO, SCIM, least privilege, access reviews, Guard cleanup, Agent SSO readiness.

Atlassian Guard Okta

load-bearing, bottom to top

Find out who can reach what.

Fixed scope. The assessment starts at the identity layer: human and non-human access, the accounts nobody owns, and what has to be true before an agent gets one. You get the findings, the ownership gaps, and the order to close them in.

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