One Product Backlog with multiple SCRUM teams

Landi May 4, 2020

Does anyone have a suggestion for managing the following:

One product backlog

2 Boards - each for one SCRUM team

How can I have sprints running for each board pulling the items from one central backlog?

Thank you for your assistance!

1 answer

0 votes
Paweł Stelmach May 5, 2020

Hi Landi,
it was mentioned in multiple topics - like https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/One-project-multiple-backlog-multiple-sprints/qaq-p/806493

Quick answer.
Set up a separate scrum board for each team.
Have a filter for each board that filters out issues based on some differentiator:
* e.g. 1 component="Team-X"  / "Team-Y" etc.

* e.g.2 label = "Team-X"  / "Team-Y" etc.

You can have many components per issue, so you can still use components like they should be used :) 
People say that benefit of components over labels here is that sub-tasks created under a story with a component assigned should get the component automatically (so it will stay with the board and its filter)

Paweł Stelmach June 4, 2020

I've set it up - tried both with teams in labels and teams in components; it works but subtasks inherit neither labels nor components -> from a quick search it seems like you'd need a plugin for that

Luis Camargo February 8, 2021

I've tried to set this up, but from Board-X I can still see the sprint created on Board-Y.
Any thoughts?

Paweł Stelmach February 9, 2021

Hi Luis,

check if your task have both components.

If a task has both, then it is picked up by both filters (each board); if it is in a specific sprint, then it will show with that sprint as well; 

so the way to do this is to have only one component per task, or share sprints among teams (though you'd have to start and close them together then);

there might be also some other edge cases - but I don't have enough info to support; the one I described is a typical mistake I've noticed;

 

BTW - I've been working with this setup for 6+ months and it works very well; I actually prefer it to the "separate teams = separate projects" approach

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Dave Markowski September 29, 2021

Teams really seem to be the way to go on this one.  Having 4 teams in a single backlog without it is starting to get a bit overwhelming 

Matt Cox December 4, 2022

I have one project with 3 teams working on the same project (same codebase). I've set up a custom field to store the scrum team and the board filters (separate boards for each team) use this field to only show issues associated with this team.

All of our issues roll up to Epics, so, to automate things, the Epics are assigned to specific teams, and I have a few Jira automations that set the 'team' custom field correctly based on the parent Epic. I also have a couple of automations that make sure sub-tasks are assigned to the correct team when created.

This is all working well so far. But make sure you create automation rules for create and update scenarios (e.g. if an Epic is moved to a different team, the 'team' field for all child issues needs to be updated).

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