How can I keep issues in backlog and prevent them to be assigned to a sprint by calculation?

[Jussi Korhonen]

I'm using standard backlog for issues that are not yet assigned to any sprint since they are e.g. ideas not yet technically designed or customer didn't approve work estimate yet. 

When trying to create a plan with jira portfolio, all those backlog issues were placed to sprints by calculation. Is there any possiblity to keep them in backlog and don't assign them to any sprint?

[Bree Davies]

Hi Jussi, 

There is an easy workaround in JIRA for this. 

For work that is not ready to be worked on (so you don't want it to be scheduled into any kind of Portfolio plan) use a label to denote it as 'not-ready' or a certain status. 

Or conversely, if you could label issues that are ready with a 'ready-for-dev', if this is going to be the least amount of effort. 

Create a new filtered board which excludes any issues matching this label, and connect your plan to this board. 

This will prevent any issues you don't want to see from appearing in your plan as they are created. 

The other option would be to create a 'backlog' release with a fixed start date in the future, and then manually assign all of your 'not ready' issues to this release, so they aren't scheduled to any upcoming sprints. You'd still see this issues in your scope table and within your plan, but you'll be forcing their lower priority. 

Hope these help

Thanks,
Bree

[tdriggs-extrahop]

Hi Bree; is there a way to exclude items by state? We've run into two issues thus far with the solution you described:

1. The "Open Issue" workflow action removes all fix versions and manually adding a Fix Version interferes with other queries we run which look for empty Fix Version issues
2. We prioritize work on a variety of separate boards, and keeping parallel boards which filter out items that aren't "Selected" isn't scalable.

Thanks,
Ted