Kanban Boards with a Backlog!
Jira has now introduced Kanban Backlogs, a much awaited feature for PM’s, SM’s and PO’s.
So Jira introduced something that so many product owners, project managers, scrum masters and everyone in the scrum team would love! A backlog view for Kanban boards. Things got a whole lot more manageable!
The main problem that Kanban boards posed was the fact that the first column in the board was essentially the backlog, and with teams or projects that use this view and have a lot of incoming requirements, the board can get very overwhelming in size, making it harder to see priorities and know when a ticket may in fact be ready for development. Now in most cases, you would have a backlog column, and a ‘To Do’ column on the Kanban board to let you know about this, which is all fine and good. Except for developers and testers, just having a board which has more than 100 tickets in the backlog column, makes the board endlessly scrollable — not the best view when trying to keep the team clear and focused on the tasks at hand.
There were also some drawbacks whereby if you had several stories which had sub-tasks, and your kanban view layout was based on sub-tasks, it was virtually impossible to re-order stories on the board which had sub-tasks. This is now no longer the restriction!
Enabling the Kanban Backlog
By enabling the kanban backlog view, the first column on the board will essentially become your backlog in the backlog tab. Your 2nd column automatically becomes the first in the kanban view.
If you had a ‘To Do’ column as your first column in the kanban board, and an ‘In Progress’ column as your second — then your ‘To Do’ will be the backlog. In this situation, you can customise your projects workflow and create a new status called: ‘Selected for Development’, or similar, and add it immediately after the ‘To Do’ status. Then assign this status to a new ‘To Do’ column in your Jira boards configuration.
This way, anything from the backlog that is dragged up to Selected for Development, will appear as the first column on your board, making the view a lot clearer for your teams!
Enjoy :)
