is there a way to create folders within a JIRA project?

[Idris Gagan]

We are using JIRA on-demand and JIRA Agile on-demand. We have two types of user stories; groomed and un-groomed. Groomed stories are the ones that have been discussed and gone through product backlog grooming and have done criteria. These stories are part of product backlog and are prioritized in the Release Planning / Prioritization meeting. Un-groomed stories are the ones that have not been discussed yet and are discussed in the product grooming meeting. Is there a way to create folders within a project to separate out these stories so that it is easy to manage and visualize? 

[Idris Gagan]

Got it. Thanks for a lot for your suggestions!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

A Scrum board won't work too well for you here, no. But a Kanban board for grooming the issues before they make their way into a sprint works *really* well in a lot of cases :-) The places we've done that, we edit the Scrum filter to explicitly exclude "issues not yet ready to plan".

[Idris Gagan]

Robert and Nic, thanks for your comments. I really like the idea of creating separate columns for different types of user stories. I am not sure if I can use an Agile Board, however, as it shows the user stories and tasks only for an active sprint and not the entire project. So the best solution would be to have two boards. A kanban board to show groomed and ungroomed stories and then an agile board to run sprints. Any thoughts?

[Robert Massaioli _Atlassian_]

What Nic said. :) JIRA Agile boards were built with this kind of flow in mind. Especially considering that you seem to sit down as a team to groom these issues.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

And I'd imagine where you currently have "new" or "open" on the far left, you'd probably want "new/un-groomed" and "groomed" as the first two columns

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Rapid and Agile boards are the same thing - the terminology for all the different boards has changed and evolved over the years, so I tend to just try to keep it simple and say just "board". Doesn't matter if someone says Agile, Greenhopper, Rapid or other older word for them. It's a "board" and it's either a "Scrum" or a "Kanban" board. Robert was talking about adding more columns to your Board.

[Daniel Wester]

You could create a separate project and have the ungroomed stories there. Then either move the story into the real work project once it's groomed (or create new and link back to the original).

[Idris Gagan]

I do like the other option - creating two columns. Can you elaborate more on that. How do I create new columns. I know how to create columns for Agile Boards and we use agile boards extensively to run sprints and our daily scrum meetings. Is rapid board different than the agile board?

[Idris Gagan]

Thank you for your quick response. We are using labels for a different purpose and using them to identify user story type would make it confusing. We use components to identify different modules / components of our application / product and then labels to identify the theme, like, interface, design, search, etc. This helps us select and group similar stories and define a theme for our releases. A friend of mine works for a company that uses JIRA Server (on premise) and he mentioned that they have various folders under projects so I was wondering if that is something that's also available in JIRA on-demand.

[Robert Massaioli _Atlassian_]

You could also add two columns to your rapid boards: groomed and ungroomed and then move issues through that. That would work too and would use workflows to accomplish the same task. This is probably the better option.

[Robert Massaioli _Atlassian_]

You could use labels to mark the issues as belonging to "groomed" and "ungroomed" and then use the powerful JIRA search utilities to separate them out. Would that do the trick?