What is a best practice for managing backlog items that are to be groomed?

[Bob Hunt]

Traditionally, some of our teams had been using 'Bucket Sprints' to manage backlog items that are in the process of being groomed. 'Bucket Sprints' are 'fake sprints' created on the backlog that will never become real sprints (i.e. will never be started) and have been a convenient way for teams to group stories together to facilitate the grooming process.

With our transition to JIRA Align, Bucket Sprints are discouraged as they confuse the tool etc. 

My teams are asking what the suggested best practices would be to handle / visualize issues that are to be groomed. One obvious approach could be the use of Labels for this purpose but labels can also be a bit messy.

What are some other best practices for addressing this within team backlogs.

[John Price]

The simplest way is to have a workflow with a clear Ready / Ready for Development status and an agreed definition of ready.  For example:

• New = may just have a Summary; it's a pipe dream at this point.
• Ready = has been fleshed out, estimated, and discussed with the team.

A good Product Owner will have things ordered in the backlog such that the next, say, 10 items not in a sprint are the ones to be refined/groomed, or will do everything under an Epic or some other theme.

It's SUPER common for POs to not be great at this, or for teams doing Scrum to not have a full-time PO at all, so really you just need clear ownership of the backlog by 1 person and then make sure they learn strategies for organizing things.

[Jim Knepley - ReleaseTEAM]

The answer from @John Price is correct.

Depending on how things go, you might also create a way to indicate that a story is groomed but has been deferred to a sprint that isn't the next one. We did this with sprint labels which tied in with reporting nicely.