Can I have two backlogs, Kanban for discovery and scrum for delivery in one project?

Diniz de Miranda
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June 3, 2019

I want to have two parallel tracks for discovery and delivery. For the discovery phase I want to use a kanban board to validate and test ideas. When those ideas are validated I want them to go to a scrum backlog for the next sprints.

 

Is it possible to do it inside jira? 

 

Thank you

1 answer

1 vote
Ollie Guan
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June 3, 2019

Hi @Diniz de Miranda ,

I think this is feasible. Create Kanban and Scrum board respectively, build filters according to the way you need them, and match the relationship between the status and the column.

Bill Sheboy
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June 4, 2019

Hi @Diniz de Miranda ... welcome to the community!

As noted by Ollie, yes you can create two boards for one backlog, making one Kanban and one Scrum, with mapped statuses and different filters to show the status values you want to include.

Of note: your scenario is fairly normal (one workflow feeding another), however Jira does not treat this as the case:

  • When you create your boards, the last column, by default, means "completed"
  • Thus, work items from your Kanban board (discover) could get marked as done even though they are about to start the Scrum board (delivery)
  • And... if you are trying to use the backlog features of Jira, you could run into some challenges between Kanban and Scrum framework practices

There are two Jira workarounds for the "done" issue: 

  • Add an "in delivery" column to your Kanban board, mapping all of your Scrum board status values to it.  Then leave that column alone, allowing the flow of work on the Scrum board to update the Kanban board when completed.  You Kanban board now reflects your full workflow.
  • Or, if you are a Jira process purist, when you finish discovery (Kanban), complete the item, clone it, and move the new issue to the Scrum backlog for selection.  This will break lead time calculations, but out-of-the-box Jira cannot compute those currently anyway.  :^)

Best regards,

Bill

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