How do set up Grooming and Sprint flow?

[Anna Pahlevanyan]

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

I have a similar question.

I want to have 2 boards, one Kanban and one Scrum.

I want Kanban board to have the following statuses:
- Backlog

- Blocked

- Selected

- Grooming

- Sizing

- Ready for Dev

I want the Scrum board to have the following:

To Do / Reopened

In Dev

In QA

In UAT

Done

I want them to have the same backlog, and everything that shows up on the Kanban board to be in the backlog list, everything in current sprint - on the sprint board

How can I achieve this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

 You can't quite do this, and even if you do get close, you'll have a very odd looking boards with people asking you why their issues are on one and not the other.

This one might be easier to start at the other end.  A project is a collection of issues that you've grouped together because they have people and configuration in common.  An issue has a workflow (different issue types inside a project can have different flows though, which becomes important later) which is a collection of status linked by transitions to allow you to move from one status to another.

Apologies if you know that already, but it's important, and may help people who land here with similar questions.

Boards are a view of a set of issues, selected by a filter.  Imagine we do something really simple for your boards and say simply "Project = X".

Columns in the boards are collections of status to group the issues into, and to allow people to update the status of issues by moving from one column to another.

So, we can set up your boards almost as you describe, but what they do will depend on the underlying workflows.   There are two basic ways you could have set them up and two outcomes.

A single workflow with all the status you have mentioned in both boards.   This will mean that the board an issue appears on depends on its status, and if you've got the workflow wrong and someone uses "plain" Jira to change the status of an issue, a rather odd looking thing where an issue appears to jump from one board to another

• Two workflows, one for (say) bugs, and one for (say) features.  Bugs will appear on one board, features on the other.
• Both of these cases leave you with two separate sets of issues, appearing on one board or the other, with separate backlogs.  In the first case, if an issue does jump board, it is going to mess up the sprint estimates as well.

So, the short version is that you will have configured boards for two separate sets of issues!

Now, if you truly do want this divergence, you can do it, but you will need to look at the status very closely, and do a couple of things, I hinted at in scenario 1:

• The "to do" status and columns must be the same, so that the backlogs of the two boards match
• The workflow must diverge, taking one set of status for scrum and another for kanban (including the end "done" states)
• The scrum masters must transition all issues in a sprint from the start-status to the first scrum-branch status when a sprint starts (automation helps here)

There is, in fact, some ways the kanban board could share status with the scrum board, but that's really complex.  There should be no way to allow an issue to drift on to or out of the scrum board.

[Anna Pahlevanyan]

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Thank you for your answer!

I think I didn't explain it correctly.
I DO want the issues to share the same backlog, I do not want the issue to appear in Kanban and Scrum at the same time.
I want a "Grooming" board and a "Sprint" board.

Basically, the issue will start with a status "New" then if it's selected to be worked on, it will get moved to "Selected", then "in Grooming", then "in Sizing", and finally "Ready for Dev".

All this time, I still want to see the issue appearing under the "Backlog" field over here:

After that - should it be selected for sprint - only then it can go onto my Sprint (Scrum) board - and at that point I don't need it in my Kanban (Grooming) board

However right now I can't seem to make these issues appear in the backlog in the list above AND on a board at the same time (Grooming board, not a Sprint board - all the issues are not in a sprint, it's just easier for me to keep track of how ready they are to be put in a sprint if I can see them on a board).

So what I'm really asking for isn't a 2nd board, but more like a Board-type view for all issues in Backlog?

[Anna Pahlevanyan]

By the way, if anyone is looking for an answer for this - I figured it out.

To solve this, make sure that you have all the statuses added in the Scrum board (you won't use them on the Scrum board, but that will make these tickets show up in the Backlog)

[Alisha Maistry]

Hi There,

I am new to being a Jira admin and setting up boards. The previous administrator set up the project similarly to how you have done yours. I am now trying to simplify it so that instead of using both boards we only use the Scrum Board.

Whenever we create any stories it goes straight to the kanban board and until it moves to a certain status does it go into the scrum board backlog.

The open status is in both board settings however do not seem to be linked.

Please can you help me with how I need to edit the workflow to ensure that newly created tickets appear on the scrum backlog.

[Anna Pahlevanyan]

@Alisha Maistry 

I don't know if this will work, but try to go to the board, click on the 3 dots to the top right, and open board settings and then map all the statuses to the board you want to use and delete the other board

Create a test project and practice there just in case, so you don't delete any tickets by accident

[MB]

Hi Anna,

Thank you for this guidance.  Yes this explanation has given me more of a clue of what I need to do to organize my grooming/kanban board.  Great example and explanation.