How to setup worklow to tier backlog?

[Philip Winston]

In this article:

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/04/how-to-manage-a-product-backlog-with-ease/

He describes backlog tiers like "Not Ready Yet" and "Ready for Feature Teams". Are these columns workflow states? Is he using a simplified or JIRA workflow? We want to setup something similar but can't figure out how it was done.

[Colin Goudie · Accepted solution]

I would say you work with 2 rapid boards.

1 - Kanban board, which is what Dan is describing. The issues progress through workflow setups. Once they hit a certain status (probably in this case, the last 2 columns), they would be visible in the scrum rapid board

2 - Scrum rapid board whose backlog filter is designed to look at issues that would be only in certain columns/states from the Kanban board above

In this way, PO's etc.. can progress items through their Kanban board, and developers/SM/PO can use the Scrum board and be confident that the items appearing on the backlog are priorities and ready for estimating etc..

[Philip Winston]

Yes thanks I agree that's what we was describing. I will acept this, but I'm just wondering about the *workflow* side of things. Does that imply his new issues start in the Not Yet Ready state, and they are transitioned basically via the Kanbad board until finallly in Ready for Feature Teams then they go to a normal status like Resovled then Closed? That is, is there anything specially to setup a workflow compabitible with his systems besides just adding a few states?

[Colin Goudie]

Yeah I would think so. Obviously I haven't seen their workflow so I'll see if Dan can pipe in here but what you described is definitely my first impression of how I'd implement it.

[Philip Winston]

Yeah I've been asking rapid fire questions about his post because we have a 1000+ issues in our backlog and have had no good process to tame. Just outright ranking them seems impossible. Using a 2nd board seems brilliant on the surface, so yeah we are starving for details!

[Jason Bailey]

@Philip Winston, Did you ultimately find a solution that allowed you to tier your backlog?  If so, would you mind sharing with me?  

[Philip Winston]

@Jason Bailey we have workflows states Hold, Later, On Deck, Ready, Active, and Done. So our backlog is tiered to that degree. I cannot say it works great, in the sense that columns are often over their limit. But that is a discipline problem of ours. Another trick is to make many different boards as alternate views. We have a board where the swim lanes are "date updated" with 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc. So that can be used to stratify Hold. Overall I'm not super thrilled with Kanban in general. I like it better than scrum. But I think organizing the backlog and keeping everything ship shape is still really an unsolved problem.