A Lane allows you to group some of the Process elements and define their common parameters. Note that a Lane may contain another Lane.

To add a new Lane, open up the Swimlanes menu item in the Object Library to show the Lane artifact. Drag and drop the Lane artifact to your Process Model. This artifact is a box in which you can add your User Tasks.

Lanes should be given distinguishing names and background colors to fully separate them into functional groups. You can do so by selecting a lane and opening up the Properties panel.

At runtime, Lanes auto-claim/assign task to user who has done another task of that Lane within the same process instance. This user must be eligible for claiming a task, that is, this user must be a potential owner. If a User Task doesn't have an actor or group assigned it marks the task as having no potential owners (and therefore, at runtime, the process will just stop).

For example, let's say there are two User Tasks (UT1 and UT2) located in the same Lane. UT1 and UT2 have group field set to the analyst value. When the Process is started, and UT1 is claimed/started/completed by an analyst user, UT2 gets claimed and assigned to the user who completed UT1. On the other hand, if only UT1 had the analyst group assigned, and UT2 had no user or group assignments, the process would stop after UT1 had been completed.