Product Backlog Order Change History Audit Trail feature request

[Carolyn McNicoll]

Does anyone else feel an audit trail of changes to the backlog would be beneficial for your teams?  Here is the scenario(s) where the idea came from.

When a PO is out and delegated responsibilities to someone else, the team(s) doesn't know who made the changes to the backlog order.  It then requires some detective work before sprint planning.  In a scaled environment with 5 teams pulling from one backlog this can complicate and slow things down quite a bit.  

The hope was to have an audit trail a the Product Backlog Item (PBI) level.  Could we get a daily historical visual snapshot of backlog order showing who made the ordering change?  Next iteration potentially an audit trail per change.  We need to know when the order of the backlog changed and who did it.  

When these changes are discovered, no one knows if the Product Owner was aware of the change because they don't know who made it.  

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Carolyn McNicoll 

To me this seems more a procedural thing.

I think it would be the PO job to notify the team(s) in case the PO delegates the responsibilities to a colleague.

Then the team(s) would now who to contact.

It shouldn't be the team function to find this out all the time.

[Carolyn McNicoll]

Thank you @Marc - Devoteam .  That would be nice in the perfect world.  But in large companies with many moving parts and constantly changing priorities and lack of communication across teams, the reality is, it gets out of control.  It also is harder for the newer, less mature teams to realize the impact a change to the backlog order may have.  And things happen when the PO is out.  Other PO's may be impacted by changes.  Having an audit trail would greatly simplify things for the teams and their coaches.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Carolyn McNicoll 

You could raise a feature request via https://jira.atlassian.com/ 

Here in community, most of us are Atlassian users like yourself, not (necessarily) employees of Atlassian. We don't have access to your environment.

This community is an open public forum.

But on the topic, as there is lack in communication, this is a problem to be tackled as an audit log won't solve this as well.

But yeah that's a change to be implemented and adopted by the people, that you can't force.

[Carolyn McNicoll]

Thanks for the link @Marc - Devoteam .  I wanted to see if there was interest from others too before submitting a request because I know most requests never see the light of day.  And I was hoping to see an Atlassian Jira staff member on here too, but this forum looks different than the JPD space where the dev team for JPD is always responding.  

[Chad Beier]

Many times a change can simply be on accident. Nonetheless, why not add clarity and transparency to changes in the order of the backlog vs make everryone search under buried audit history per item?

Seems like a table stakes feature for a tool that allows many people to collaborate. 

Think Google Sheets version history.