What is the effective way to introduce Yearly, 6 Months and 3 Months Bucket for Jira Backlog?

[Amit Bhola]

I know the workaround that we can create fake sprints which can be further used as buckets but not in the favor of this workaround, any other way to acheive this?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Amit Bhola 

At what scale / granularity are the items you are planning for 3, 6, 12 month planning horizons?

After timeframe-based planning, do delivery teams plan / work-breakdown items before build?

If these are large requests and a delivery team then executes on them, you may want to investigate using Jira Product Discovery.  This is a newer feature of Jira Cloud, although it now has additional licensing costs.  With this you could:

• create / ideate your needs, and create Ideas
• create a roadmap view, with timeframe-based columns
• drag-and-drop on the view, as needs arise
• associate the Ideas with delivery team work items: Epics, Stories, etc.

Please look at these sources for more information:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/product-discovery
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery/gh-p/jira-product-discovery

Kind regards,
Bill

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Alternatives that come to my mind:

1. You could define a single-select custom field "Bucket" with options "3-month", "6-month" and "Year". 
2. You could also represent the buckets with issue labels "3-month-bucket", "6-month-bucket", etc. It is less rigid than the previous, which may or may not be a problem.

The disadvantage of both is that you have to manage the field value or the labels manually. Maybe if you create automation rules to help with it, and trigger each automation with a user-clickable button "Move to yearly bucket", etc. then it is more intuitive.

But it still doesn't support drag-and-dropping in the Backlog view.

[Amit Bhola]

Yes! Custom fields or Labels is another workaround with the limitation of no drag and drop. Thanks @Aron Gombas _Midori_  for your input, I'll keep the forum open for other best practices.