How to allow Product Owners to easily flag issues in Backlog for closure or deletion

[Kim Raham]

We maintain several backlogs, each with different Product Owners. Some of those backlogs have a huge number of issues in them, many of which where imported when we switched to Jira a couple of years ago.

We are looking for the quickest way in which Product Owners can review the issues in these large backlogs and flag them for:

a) closure as "Won't Do"; or

b) Permanent deletion

The best idea we have come up with is to create some new temporary statuses (i.e. "Delete", "Close", etc.) and ask the Product Owners to quickly review each issue in the backlog and assign it to the correct status for action by our Jira administrators.

Is there a better way to handle this triage work?

Thanks, Kim

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kim Raham -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Short answer: any better / worse methods will depend upon how your product owners are evaluating issues' disposition.

For example, if you decided anything requested more than X months ago for product Y is of suspect value, you could mark it as "won't do" using a JQL filter to find the issues and bulk edit.  There may be several guidelines like this your product owners could develop.

Any others requiring actually reading the issue will take time to read and mark.  Using the list views with inline editing may make this process faster.

For these reasons, rather than immediately deleting issues, it may be better to "mark" them (e.g., label, status, etc.) and start an aging clock to decide next steps.  There is no built-in "undo" in Jira Cloud, and so deletion is permanent / not reversible.  Perhaps talk to your Site Admin to learn if issues are regularly backed up or if you have any marketplace apps which help undo accidental deletions.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Kim Raham]

Hi Bill,

Thanks so much for your quick reply! I really like your idea of using a JQL filter to bulk edit based on date, and starting an aging clock for marked issues. Editing issues inline will also be a real time saver, especially when there are so many to review.

We'll take this away for discussion and next steps. Thanks for getting us started on the path to success!

-Kim