Two Teams (Scrum + Kanban) in One Project — Safe to Add a To Do Status Only for Kanban?

cvanduyn

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping to get some clarity on best-practice when running both a Scrum team and a Kanban team inside the same Jira project.

Context

• Both teams work in the same project.

• The boards are segmented by JQL (Team = Kanbaners for Kanban, Team = Scrummers for Scrum).

• The Kanban team needs to enable the Kanban Backlog, which requires creating an additional status in the To Do statusCategory (e.g., a “Backlog” or “Ready” status).

• The Scrum team does not need or want this additional To Do status.

My question:

If I create the additional To Do-category status for the Kanban workflow, is it safe to simply leave that status unmapped on the Scrum board’s column configuration?

Or could this create problems where Scrum-team issues accidentally get transitioned into that unmapped status and then disappear from the Scrum board, since unmapped statuses won’t show up there?

Essentially:

• Is it OK to have a To Do status intended only for the Kanban team in a project that also contains a Scrum team?

• Is it best practice to rely on board filters to keep the teams separate, or should each team’s workflow avoid sharing statuses entirely?

I want to avoid a situation where Scrum issues get stuck or hidden because they landed in a status their board doesn’t map.

Any advice from admins who’ve run mixed (Scrum + Kanban) teams in a single project would be really appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Staffan Redelius

Hi, @cvanduyn 

If you drag the status "To Do" to Unmapped it will be hidden from both the backlog and the active scrum board. I think it would be safer to map it to the first column in the sprint board. There could be cases where work items would be unintentionally transitioned to that status but not be visible for the team. If the column don't contain any issues in that status it will not be visible for the team.

Workflows applied are shared within the Jira space and connected to the work item type so the only way to have different workflow is to connect them to different work item-types and have different work item types for different teams but that seems a bit over complicated.

You can create a custom drop-down field for "Team" and make that mandatory upon creation of the work items. Then you create separate filters for each board based on the custom "team" field.

Best regards,
/Staffan