Is it possible to have a single backlog for 4 different projects? How to do that if possible?

[Jorge Raul Garcia Cuevas]

Hi, I´m migrating from github(zenhub) to JIRA. My project actually have a single backlog and we are in a re-organization where our team will be splitted in 4 teams (projects), I´d like to know if it is possible to have in JIRA that, one single backlog for 4 different projects and how to do it?

I´m thinking in having a GENERAL PROJECT with the backlog and then create 4 PROJECTS one for each team, in every project I will create sprints f with issues taken from the GENERAL PROJECT.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[John Fetzik]

I have not done this with Jira, but did do something similar years ago in a different system. It does work, but there are potential downsides.

When you move an issue from the "backlog" project you loose visibility in that project, because it no longer exists there. This worked ok for us because our "backlog" project was more like a wish list than a development backlog.

Visibility issues could be mitigated some because filters and boards in Jira can go across projects.

Another option would be to keep the initial issue in the "backlog" project and link to a new issue in the actual development project(s). Would depend on what you kept in the "backlog" project I think. If the "backlog" project is mostly Epics and Stories this may work better than if it is a lot of bugs fixes. Just an idea.

The other downside was making sure things got moved correctly. In our case we had different custom fields in different projects. So people had to remember to fill these out properly when moving things.

How to organize this depends on exactly why you need to do something like this. In our case the groups backlog, turned wish list, was just getting way to big, with hundreds of items that could sit for a long time. We would get to most of them, but it could take literally years, depending on priorities and budgets. 

The biggest advantage for a separate "backlog" project in our case was we could have a different workflow than what the actual development projects had. States like submitted, in review, reviewed scheduled, reviewed postponed, rejected, etc.