Our issue backlog had grown over time, and was difficult to use.

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Here’s what we did about it.

JIRA Cleanup

Our backlog had grown over time, and had become unmanageable.

It was really hard to have clear cycles in all this noise.

QA

PM

Where do we even begin??

We bulk-closed old tickets.

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Much of our backlog hadn’t been updated in years.

Seasons come, and seasons go - it’s normal to have times of growing tickets, but well-managed, this is followed by times of work closure.

JIRA Cleanup

In one week we went from 1,500 to 200 unresolved issues.

In the process we re-discovered some old but still critical tickets.

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Over-use of certain Labels made it hard to see priority issues.

So we changed our Priority Labels.

Down-prioritizing interesting work is hard.

This issue isn’t Critical, but it certainly isn’t Minor.

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Guess I’ll leave it as Major.

Blocker

Critical

Major (default)

Minor

Trivial

Use of Priority Levels in JIRA

Where do we even begin??

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I hope there’s nothing too important buried in Major...

Blocker

Critical

Major (default)

Minor

Trivial

What happens if we change the wording, and the default?

Blocker

Critical

Major (default)

Minor

Trivial

Blocker

Critical

Major (default)

Minor

Trivial

In <2 months, the spread was improving.

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Start

1 week later

3 weeks later

6 weeks later

In <2 months, the spread was improving.

Critical issues became more clear.

Start

1 week later

3 weeks later

6 weeks later

We simplified and standardized our workflows.

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Most projects had different, complex workflows.

QA Workflow

Devs’ Workflow

Simplified Workflow

Numerous Issue Types

Confusion with when to use different types

Sub-tasks hid the extent of unfinished work

Numerous Issue Types

We then chunked work under Epics.

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In hindsight, we could have also followed the approach of Epics → Stories → Tasks (and Bugs).

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The goal was to reduce confusion and edge-cases in Jira that threw off our metrics and planning.