Grooming your backlog

If you are using Scrum or Kanplan, then a big part of your routine will be to groom your backlog. This means making sure that high-priority items are floated to the top and not getting buried. This is a constant exercise and is especially important as you and your team approach the start of a new sprint, in the case of Scrum. With Kanplan, it is just as important to prioritize the tasks so that your team can maintain their throughput and not violate any constraints because of poor planning.

Jira’s backlog comes with several handy features to help you avoid turning backlog grooming into a tedious exercise. To prioritize issues in your backlog, you simply move the high-priority issues up and move the low-priority issues down. While this seems very simple, as your backlog grows, it can become tricky to drag an issue from the bottom of a backlog with hundreds of issues to the top – and let’s not forget that newly added issues go to the bottom...