In JIRA, is it possible to have items show up in a project backlog but not show up in a sprint's column?

Question

I've set up workflows, workflow schemes, issue type schemes, and everything else required to get a project through my customized steps from new idea to live release. The default behavior of "Agile" JIRA has caused a problem, however.

When using the Plan tab under the Agile view, it shows any sprints and the Backlog of issues in your project. If an item is not shown in one of the columns (seen under the Work tab for a sprint), it will not show up in the Backlog.

Is there a way to make these items appear, without having to show the column?

Explicit Details

Columns:

All Issues Column || To Do || In Progress || Done

If I have 50 items in All Issues Column, it shows all 50 in each sprint. So I remove the All Issues Column, leaving:

To Do || In Progress || Done

But now the 50 items don't even show up in the Backlog in the "Plan" tab. I want them to show up with the "Plan" tab view but without having to include the column.

Answer 1

There seem to be two orthogonal issues involved with your current JIRA Agile board configuration/usage:

If I have 50 items in All Issues Column, it shows all 50 in each sprint.

Whether an issue shows up in a specific column in Work mode depends on how you have been Mapping Columns to JIRA Statuses:

By default, a board's columns are mapped to the default JIRA statuses as shown in the following tables. You can change this if you wish. For example, if you are using additional, customised JIRA statuses, you will probably want to map them to appropriate columns in your board.

For example:

• the default Done column shows issues with either the Resolved or the Closed status
• alternatively you could also add another column Closed and move the Closed status to that one if you wanted to visualize this aspect or allow users to execute the Resolved=> Closed workflow transition by 'moving it across columns'

Given your issues apparently only showed up in your custom All Issues column, I suspect you have a custom status in place or moved the default ones to that column specifically. Since you now removed that column, the workflow steps formerly mapped to that column should now show up in the Unmapped Statuses column in your board configuration and you need to remap them to the other columns according to your desired configuration.

But now the 50 items don't even show up in the Backlog in the "Plan" tab.

An issue only shows up in the Plan mode's backlog as long as it hasn't been assigned to one or more sprints - in order to make it reappear in the backlog, you need to remove it from any sprint, there are two possible scenarios:

• the sprint has already been started (that seems to be the case for you) - please refer to Removing an Issue from a Sprint for how to achieve this
• the sprint hasn't been started yet - just drag the issues from the sprint down to the backlog again

With respect to the column configuration addressed above, please also note the additional constraints outlined in Using Plan Mode - in particular, An issue will only be visible in Plan mode if:

• the issue is not a Sub-Task;
• the issue matches the board's Saved Filter (see Configuring Filters);
• the issue's status maps to one of the board's columns (but not the 'Done' column);and
• there is at least a status being mapped to the right most column. Eg. If you have the columns To Do, In Progress, and Done, ensure that you have a status mapped to In Progress at least. If you map all the statuses to the first column (To Do), you will not be able to see any issues in the Backlog.