Hiding issues in the product backlog from the team backlog

Question

Through a lot of discussion, our group has developed a Jira configuration that we think will work best for us:

* A Jira project for each Scrum team which houses the team's board and any team-specific (i.e., not directly related to a project) issues.* The board JQL looks searches across projects for issues assigned to that team (using the Team) field

* A Jira project for each "product"/"product family" which houses the issues, requirements, test cases, etc... for that "product"/"product family"

If a team is assigned to work on many different items from many different projects, all those items will be visible in the team's backlog (as it should be).  However, if a project is not yet in progress (e.g., it is on hold), it is a bit messy for the team to still see those items in their backlog.  Every sprint planning they look at the same items an say: "ignore these for now since we aren't working on this project".

My question is, is there an effective way to "hide" a project from the team's backlog until the project is ready to be worked on?

One (perhaps clunky) way I can think of is to modify the team's backlog filter to exclude issues from a given project.  But is there a better way?

Another "option" would be to remove the Team field assignment on those issues.  The problem is, when looking at the product backlog, we would still like to see the fact that those items would be worked on by a given team.

Petru Simion [Simitech Ltd.] · Answer

Hi @Patrick Wright ,

A Jira Project of type Software supports Sprints, and therefore the notion of a Backlog.

When an issue is created for such a project it appears in the Backlog. This is because, conceptually, the issue is a candidate to be dealt with in a future Sprint.

If you want your team to have different views into the issues, you can create a filter.

Since you would want to avoid issues appearing into the Backlog of the Project before being in a certain state, I suggest you should create another project where your team will create the issues. When issues will be ready to be Backlog candidates, then they can be migrated to the Project that supports the Sprint.

Regards,

Petru

Stephen.Lugton · Answer

Correct, but you would still have to make sure that whatever role you give them allows them to update the ticket / change statuses / comment / etc. like they already can

Patrick Wright · Answer

This is a neat idea.  I have already set up a permissions scheme to work with roles.  And I already have a role called "User" that gives simple "read" (browse) access to a project.

So, if I understand correctly, all I need to do is simply not grant a team the "User" role to a given project and, even though their board filters any items assigned to the team, because they don't have browse permission for that project, those issues won't appear?