How do I set up a Jira Kanban board to have queues before the backlog?

Question

I have a Kanban board going, but the backlog is large enough to be unmanageable. I'd like to have a pair of queues before the backlog, "untriaged" and "triaged", where the bulk of the long-range roadmap tasks will sit, instead of cluttering up the daily-use version of the kanban board. Having these two extra priority queues will also keep a clear distinction between tasks that the team can freely adopt (stuff in the backlog) and stuff they can't (triaged/untriaged.)

I looked at filtering the kanban based upon priority, which would remove untriaged tasks, but it wouldn't allow me a space where I can roughly sort these tasks by priority.

I'd welcome any answers that accomplish the basic requirement, though I don't want to have extra columns on the Kanban board. Jira wastes too much screen space as it is (I would love to jettison it in favor of Pivotal).

Answer 1

I see three possible solutions, presented here in my own recommended order of viability:

1. Create swimlanes based off of a criteria. Go to Board -> Configure -> Swimlanes -> Select "Queries" in the dropdown. Then you can create swimlanes based on priority or whatever jquery that you can think up. This way you can also reorder swimlanes such that untriaged are at the bottom, out of the way unless you want to go look at them.

2. Create a seperate board for triaging. You could create an entirely separate triage board. By making the new board only have untriaged and the old one only have the triaged, you can keep everything clean and easy to see what is currently being worked on. Downside of this is now you have two places you have to look for issues.

3. Convert to a scrum board. You'll have at least one backlog (you can create other sprints that act as pseudo-backlogs) that you just pull the top X items into an always-running sprint. This method is not elegant and uses the tool in a questionable way. But it will get the job done.