Backlog is 600 issues assigned to me, what am I doing wrong?

Question

The way we use Jira is to log tickets new tickets with priority set to "Unprioritized".  We then meet as a group and prioritize the tickets and assign them to people.  We've been doing this for a while and now have 1000's of issues assigned across the whole team.  So, I now have 600 tickets in my backlog.  Manually ranking them takes time.  When I look at my backlog it seems to be sorted randomly, but I guess the new issues are just added at the bottom.

The question is what am I doing wrong?  The list is unmanageable and I end up using Issues->Search to get a list in priority order and picking a few of the top priorities to put on the sprint.  Should we not be assigning the lower priority ones until we get there?  Should we be trying to rank the issues instead of assigning a priority?

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_ · Answer

There are several approaches to tackle this problem:

- Do you use different issue (ticket) types? Bugs, Suggestions, Change Requests,...

You could create different boards displaying only tickets for certain teams or groups

- Backlogs normally use a rank, so a sorting is done primarily by rank

- Issue assignment can be done automatically. This depends if you want to allow unassigned issues

- Use components to categorize tickets & then use quickfilters in the backlog & board to filter on these categories

- You can use priorities. But who is setting this? The creator/author? Can he decide what is a highest prio?

Just some ideas & hints to lead you on your way.

Best

JP

Patrick Ricciardi · Answer

If I'm understanding the workflow correctly tickets come in with a priority of Unprioritized. Your team meets as a group and prioritizes and assigns the tickets to the relevant person.  After a number of these team meetings you have 600 tickets assigned to you with the priority.

You could create a filter based on tickets that are assigned to you in order of priority. Save that filter and stick it on your dashboard to make it easier to go through your list.

pat