how to manage a board with thousand of issues?

Question

Hi,

In following page it's said that Jira software boards supports until 5000 issues:

"Boards can display up to 5000 issues at a time. If your board is trying to display more than 5000 issues at once, you'll receive an error message, and be prompted to update your filters."

Just curiosity, do you have boards with thousand of issues? how do you handle that kind of board? could you share your examples of big boards?

A board with more than 100 issues is crazy, even if you use filters, quick filters, swinlines, colors, etc...

Best regards!

John Funk · Answer

Hey Carlos,

In my opinion, a board with that many issues is unmanageable. Why wouldn't you just create multiple boards based on components or labels or something?

John Dunkelberg · Answer

Carlos,

I have seen boards with thousands of issues, in a very long-lived product area where the board is bringing in every request that customers have ever made for that.  Imagine if Atlassian was to try to make a board to cover everything we've ever asked of Jira, or even just of the sub-area of Jira boards! :)

The challenge, as you may be implying, is to get the team to groom that long list.  In many company cultures, it's tough for a team to make the hard decision "no, look, we're just never going to do that, just close the issue." And indeed we see that with Atlassian as well, which leads to the quite frequent threads of people complaining "this issue has been open for 10 years, when is Atlassian going to fix it!"

So as with many things, it's not really about the technical capabilities of the boards, it's about the culture and process that is the deeper "why" behind it.

-john

Deniz Tımartaş_8hi33r · Answer

Hi Carlos,

For Kanban boards, you can have the option to have a sub-filter which you can trim the number of issues without affecting your reports and for Scrum boards, the best use scenario would be to split your issues into different boards depending on a filter with components, versions, labels etc.

Best Regards, :)