Question

I have setup Jira and Greenhopper and set up an initial sprint. I have mostly done scrum during my years via a whiteboard and face-to-face communication. I wonder how I should handle unplanned items using greenhopper? I don’t just want to add a New Card and have it screw up the statistics. Would be nice to be able to get a figure of the ammount of unplanned work when the sprint is done. My initial guess was to add a New Card on the Task Board and tag it as an unplanned. But I don’t seem to find any unplanned tag for a Card.

Answer 1

I’ve been using Greenhopper for about 1 1/2 years. It works pretty well and is invaluable to our team but isn’t a substitute for post-its on the well for the daily stand-up. Over the 1.5 years, we’ve ended up collecting a lot of tasks, bugs, and other items in Jira that aren’t immediate backlog items. Managing them is the most difficult in Greenhopper. These are the Unscheduled items.

I have these versions set up in Greenhopper:

Unscheduled: this is a holding pen for a few hundred items that we may or may not ever get around to. Some are ideas, some are bugs that we can’t fix at the moment.

Unscrubbed bugs: as we find new bugs that aren’t related to the current sprint’s work, they go in here. Every week or so, we go through them and place them in one of the other versions.

Short Term Roadmap: stuff we’ll get to soon but not in this or the next sprint.

Sprint Planning: this is the backlog we work from during planning. It’s the higher priority items.

v2.3 – Sprint 2 (or whatever version/sprint we are currently working): This is the sprint backlog.

During the current sprint and before our sprint planning session, I organize the backlog and place the high priority items in Sprint Planning so we will get to them next. After the meeting, we place the items we sign up todo into the v2.3 – Sprint 2 and them manage it on a daily basis.