Scrum AND Kanban board in a single project: workflow with Kanban backlog

[Arnaud Breton]

Hi,

We're mixing Scrum and Kanban based boards in our single JIRA project. We made that decision because some dev activities fit more in a Kanban flow. So far so good, no worries to mix the two.

However, we also wanted to leverage the kanban backlog in the kanban boards. In order to make this work, I added an additional initial state in our workflow, named "backlog", before the standard "open" one.

For Kanban boards, things work perfectly when taking an issue out of the backlog to the active queue (todo).

For Scrum boards, it's a little more complicated since in order to see all the issues, I had to map both statuses. Now, when moving issues from backlog (in backlog status) to a sprint, they stick in backlog, leading to weird situations (I'm using the open status to build some reports).

Is there a better way to manage this?

Thanks for your help.

[miikhy]

Hi Arnaud,

Scrum boards and Kanban boards are not handling backlog the same way:

• Backlog is a status or set of status in Kanplan
• Backlog is based on sprints being allocated in Scrum boards

That being said, I think what you need is a way to automate the transition from Backlog to Open when filling out a Sprint. You won,t find an easy way to do so if you're sprinting using the Agile view in Jira, best way would be to build a transition from Backlog to Open displaying the Sprint so that your sprinting would imply the transition, you could have a different transition for Kanban but that would still be confusing. I think the best approach would be to refine your reports, instead of using the "Open" status, you might want to check for "Open status OR backlog status and sprint is not empty" :)

Hope this helps!

[Arnaud Breton]

Great, thanks for the detailed answer. Now you confirmed that there's no better way to make both boards type work together in JIRA, I'll look into post functions combined with https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.innovalog.jmwe.jira-misc-workflow-extensions/cloud/overview

Keep you posted.

[miikhy]

Misc WF is a great addition which will probably give you new perspectives!

keep us posted!