How to have sprint based and non sprint based stories as children of the same epic.

[Marie Robinson]

I am the project manager on an integrations dev team.  we use the scrum project board as a team board and use epics for each integration we have to deliver - these run 2 weeks to 3 months depending on complexity.  The stories and tasks are the children of the epics and we use the epic as the swim lane. We have 1 week sprints. 

We have a need to track pre-dev work because we are dealing with 3rd parties so time to complete is not completely in our control. and have multiple integrations going all the time.

My thought is to have a separate board for tasks that are before dev.  however these tasks do not fit into sprints and also have a different workflow.  just todo, in progress and done. (our dev board basically has dev, qa, merge, done)

once the pre-dev work is complete the development stories can go in the sprint backlog

what would be the best way to manage sprint and non sprint work items on separate boards, within the same project?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sprints are created from a backlog on a board, and a board is defined primarily by the board filter.

So, if you can set up your issues so that you can put something in a filter to distinguish between sprint-enabled issues and non-sprint issues, then you can use the board filters to select them independently. 

The (minor) downside of this is that your sprint boards will refer to Epics that should be closed according to the board, as all stories on the board appear to be done, but because there are non-sprint items that might still be open, the Epic looks active.

>My thought is to have a separate board for tasks that are before dev.

That is the best way to do it, and as you need different workflows, leads to a simple strategy of having (at least) two "story" level issue types - "development" and "pre-development".  That way you can give the two types the different workflows, and your two boards can have filters like "Project = X and issuetype = development" and "Project = X and issue-type = pre-development"