Why do completed User Stories remain in backlog

[Rebecca Lavash]

We just started using Jira for Agile development and I noticed today that our COMPLETED user stories/issues are retained in the backlog. This is NOT good since it means the backlog is going to get very full and therefore, pretty useless as a place to store future user stories.

Is it possible to get this completed user stories out of the backlog without deleting them? It seems to me they should be retained for at least a year after the work is completed but should not display in the backlog because they are not the backlog, they are completed.

thanks

Becky

[Rebecca Lavash · Accepted solution]

It turns out that the old user stories were not fully closed and accepted. Completing that process removed them from the backlog in the Plan View.

[Rajib Ahmed]

What exactly did you do?

[Rebecca Lavash]

I am using the planning board in Jira. I can see the current iteration and the previous iteration, and the backlog.

The user stories that are still appearing in the backlog are completed, have been assigned to a release in both the "affects version" and "fixed version" fields.

The user stories that are in the backlog and completed were in Sprints, although i can not verify since I can't see older sprints.

Does that help?

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

When you're using Greenhopper, you need to try and do as much of your work in Greenhopper as possible. It is a wrapper around Jira standard functions, but it is doing more and more things outside of Jira. The notion of a backlog is a Greenhopper function. Jira has no such native function. In Greenhopper, when you assign an issue to a sprint, it moves from the backlog. If you never assign the issue to a sprint and someone resolves the issue in Jira, you can have this problem. Another area you can get in trouble on is Epics. If you close an Epic in Jira, you won't be able to complete it in Greenhopper until you reopen the issue.

[Remigiusz Jackowski]

Completed issues are still in backlog, till you assign them to version and release that version.

[Dave]

This is essentially the issue; any issue which would match the underlying filter, and is not assigned to a sprint, will appear in your backlog. I would suggest updating your JQL WHERE clause to avoid this if possible by including something like "AND (issue is NOT resolved AND issue NOT IN openSprints() and issue NOT IN closedSprints() )" - which should exlude any issues that are resolved but not in sprints.

[Christian Czaia [Decadis AG]]

What kind of board are you using? Usually, once you complete a sprint the stories that have been completed in the sprint disappear from the planning board...

[Christian Czaia [Decadis AG]]

...and boards are based on filters or quick filters...Just filter on stories that have NOT been completed..