Best practices on how to triage issues

[Lars Böhnke]

Hey community! I wonder whats best practice for you guys on how to triage new issues/backlog grooming.

How do you identify new issues to prioritize them? Currently new issues are assigned to the product owner who then does the priotization and unasssigns the issue again.

But this involves logs of emails sent out by JIRA. There must be a better way! For example, could one define an issue state and every new issue who wasn't touched gains this status? Or any other ways to identify new issues?

Looking forward to your answers, big thing for us…

[Peter DeWitt · Accepted solution]

@Lars Böhnke, I think you're on to it with that last question you posed.

I start with a new status for holding all the new issues created.  Call it whatever you like.  The issues here are left unassigned.  Once someone looks at them they can push the issue in one of two ways, either through a triaged transition which ends up in a Ready For Work Status or a start work transition which ends up in the In-Progress Status.  We do this as some items will be sprinted and others just need to get done.

When we do sprint planning we focus on the items that are in that Ready for Work status.

You could also simply created a "holding sprint" call something like Up Next.  Using this method, all your new items would come into the backlog and once triaged/groomed they could be moved into the "holding sprint" and prioritized.  Think of it as an additional backlog.  You could still leave the backlog issues unassigned and only add an assignee when moving them into the "holding sprint"

pjd

[Mary Murphy]

We use the same method @Peter DeWitt describes and just call it a "Staging" status.  When an issue is created, it is sent to the "Staging" status unassigned.  We've also built a filter for this status and created subscriptions for those on that part of the team so they get notified automatically, via email, for issues in this status.  Then they can "get work" by assigning to themselves or other members.  It's pretty clean and I can create reports on it as well.