Is there a "Backlog Healthcheck" Report?

Mark Brady3

I'm looking for a way of measuring the health of a Product's backlog. What does that mean? How far in advance are stories sized. What percentage have a good description (more than a few words)? What percentage of stories have acceptance criteria? Etc.

I'm new to this, so if those metrics do not make sense, please provide alternatives instead of critique. 

The ultimate goal is a way to measure the Product Owner performance on backlog hygiene.

Nicolas Bourdages

This sounds like a good idea for a plugin, but there's nothing out there that does it.

Basically, you want your product owner to keep on top of things. One way to do this is to flag "unhealthy" issues in a JQL filter.

If you make a custom field for your acceptance criteria, it would be easy to highlight issues for which this field is empty

"Acceptance Criteria" is EMPTY

How far in advance are stories sized is trickier. You would need to ask "Up to which Rank value do backlog items have Story Points", but the ranks are not stored as 1,2,3..., they're lexorank values (1|asdfds, 1|dhaseld....) that are handy for ordering, but not so much for filtering.

 So, you'd need something else to identify the items that are due to be started soon. That depends on how the PO works. If the PO uses due dates or any other date field, you could do something like this:

("Acceptance Criteria" is EMPTY OR "Story Points" is EMPTY) AND "Due Date" <= 14d

That query means "issues due 14 days or less from now that have no story points yet or that don't have acceptance Criteria".

A way to obtain a metric would then be a count of the number of issues that require the PO's attention

This is obviously a complex topic, but any solution you might reach will involve the PO working in a specific, trackable way, using statuses, votes, filling a future "Ready to plan" sprint with "healthy" issues ahead of time etc.