Creating a separate Backlog (unrefined cards) & Prioritized Backlog (ordered refined cards)

Question

Hello, I'm trying to figure out the best way to create a separate delineation within our team project. We essentially have 2 separate statuses for cards within our backlog, but the Jira backlog feature doesn't seem to allow for anything other than a full "Backlog" and separate sprints to be displayed/created. The main issue is we want to make sure that if work is finished in a sprint we have a prioritized, ready to play list of cards that any of our engineers can go and pick up without asking.

We've currently got around this by creating our board as seen below:

However, this has the big drawback of not being able to use the built in jira sprint features correctly (burndown, estimation, etc).

What would be a perfect solution to our issue is if we could create a separate Prioritized Backlog where we could drag pointed/refined/groomed cards up from the backlog/needs refinement section that would be ideal, but I don't know if such a thing is possible.

Any help, information, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Trudy P Claspill · Accepted Answer

Hello @zstuder

Welcome to the community.

You can't have two separate "backlogs" in the true sense of the word in Jira. How we have worked around this is to set up a sprint named "Groomed", and move the refined/prioritized/groomed backlog stories to that sprint. We never start the "Groomed" sprint - we treat is as a backlog holder.

Sam Nadarajan · Accepted Answer

Hello @zstuder, and welcome to the community!

I've seen a couple of different options in play.

1) Create a "dummy" sprint that sits above the backlog. This sprint will never be used as a sprint, but it creates a container in your backlog view that you could drag and drop prioritized work into. In your planning sessions, you can pull from this dummy sprint to your actual sprints. I personally don't like this workaround, boards should really only have 1 backlog to pull from, when more backlogs are added and managed it makes it harder to identify where to pull work from and where work should go. That being said, I've seen this work.

2) Create a separate refinement board that handles all refinement activities. In this case, you could extend your current workflow to include statuses as part of the refinement process. Then, the backlog of your current board can be mapped to the "Ready to Play" status, which would be the last status of your refinement board. Essentially, you would have 1 workflow, but half of those statuses would be mapped to your refinement board and the other half would be mapped to your development board.

I'm not understanding your statement, "The main issue is we want to make sure that if work is finished in a sprint we have a prioritized..." does the "Tasks" status reflect work completed within a sprint?