Is it possible to have two backlogs for Agile?

Question

Many of our projects have huge backlogs with more than 100 issues. It gets very difficult to see and prioritize these when Sprint planning.

We've tried a workaround by creating a sprint (we have parallel sprints enabled), "Top Backlog" but it's not an ideal solution - the "sprint" was accidentally closed and all the issues went into the backlog.

It would be great to have two real, separate Backlogs that we could re-title so as to separate out issues.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

Another option is to have 2 different statuses in the workflow, one for Open tickets and another for those tickets that are qualified to appear in the backlog (maybe call it 'reviewed' or 'ready for planning' or something similar). You can then make sure only the qualified tickets (in the second state) appear in your actual backlog.

You can move tickets from the first state to the second state using a Kanban board if you like the drag and drop - more like a backlog planning

pschaff01 · Answer

Hi Kathleen,

Currently there isn't one specific feature to create different backlogs in one Agile board, but one workaround I can think of at this point would be to do something similar to:

* Create labels for each backlog, for example backlog1 and backlog2 (it can be components instead of labels, or any other field you want)
* Apply the first label to issues you want in the "First backlog" and the second to issues you want to the "Second backlog"
* Now browse to the "Quick Filters" of the board inside the "Configure" board button
* Create one quick filter for each label, such as "label = backlog1" and another quick filter "label = backlog2"
* Then when browsing back to the plan mode of the board you will see these quick filters on the top of the screen
* Click on the "backlog1" filter for example
* Now only issues with this label will apear (which will create a behaviour similar to what you need)
* Now you can work only with this issue from the first backlog.
* To see all issues again you can just unselect this quick filter, or choose the second filter to see only issues from the "second backlog"

The good part of this implementation is that you can create as many backlogs as you want, since they are based on labels.

We hope this helps as a workaround!

Cheers