Can I link Backlog of two projects?

[Ashwani Kumar]

I have two different projects, one is Software Project (Scrum) and another one is Business Project (Kanban).

I want stories created under Kanban project backlog should also be reflected in Scrum project backlog. So team can manage all stories in Scrum project even though they are added into Kanban project backlog.

Can't merge these two project because the users are different for both of these projects. But its a single team who work on stories of these projects. 

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Ashwani Kumar , you could create a third board to manage the backlog for both the Kanban and Scrum project.

Dashboards with a specific filter are also an alternative to follow-up on the backlog of both projects.

[Ashwani Kumar]

Hi @Dave Mathijs could you please guide me further how can two backlogs be linked in a common board? to achieve the above suggested solution.

I want backlogs of two different projects to be managed in one project.

[Dave Mathijs]

Create a filter covering issues from the 2 projects. Then create a new board (preferably Kanban with Backlog) from that filter.

Still mixed feelings about a shared board though a scrum and kanban are quite different, hence my suggestion to create a dashboard preferably.

[Ashwani Kumar]

Thanks, and yes the challenge is these are different type of boards. Also issues will be keep on adding so am not sure if filter will work.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Those two problems are not really problems.

A backlog is a list of issues, ranked into the team's desired order of getting stuff done, and expected to change often.   (You can order it by other things, but, well, don't.  It makes the backlog pretty useless)  The important thing here is that the rank of an issue is global.

So, if you have board 1 and board 2, they have backlogs for those boards.  If you have board 3 which looks at the issues that board 1 and 2 select together, you have a combined backlog, which fully respects the rank that 1 and 2 see.

Note here that I've not mentioned the board type - that's because it doesn't matter here.   The rank is independent of the board and its type.  It's a global field and it doesn't matter how you are looking at it!

On the second, a filter is a saved search.  When you're looking at a board or backlog, the filter is drawing in issues to be viewed by, not contained in the board.  Unless you construct it to have fixed points, it answers the question "give me a list of issues that match these criteria now".  It's not static - you can run a filter that gives you one list today and will give you a different one tomorrow because the data on the issues has changed.

So "issues will be added" is not a problem for the filters.

Take the most obvious and simple case for board filters:

• Board 1:  Project = ABC
• Board 2:  Project = XYZ
• Combined board:  Project in (ABC, XYZ)

That will handle all your new issues fine.

The one thing I would very strongly recommend though - if you're going to work with combined boards/backlogs like this, then use Kanban for it.

Both Scrum and Kanban work best if you say "A board is where a single team works to get stuff done", or even "Board = Team", but Scrum boards bring you stuff that you really don't want to be trying to manage cross-team with more than one board.  Kanban boards do not have those complexities and are hence ok to use for overviews, ranking many teams' work, building dependencies, slicing up work in different ways, and so on.

[Ashwani Kumar]

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- for a thorough understanding.