Your Backlog Management: Filtered or Unfiltered?

The VersionOne Backlog is a powerful piece of the application that allows Product Owners to prioritize their work.  With many projects being worked on, multiple teams contributing and requirements that change, a backlog may start to contain hundreds of items.

We want to make sure that members who modify the backlog have the ability to quickly find the items they are looking for.  Many of our loyal readers may know about the Filter option on the Backlog grid to assist them in locating certain items.  Filters can be applied to look for items in a particular Epic, belonging to a particular team, or even finding items in a certain status.  However, many users may not be taking advantage of the “More Filters” list or the “My Filters” capability.

More Filters

“More Filters” exposes a list of additional filters that can be applied to the grid view you are on.  The window that comes up when selecting that option allows you to choose from other list types related to that asset.

So, if you were looking for all defects of a particular type, you can open the More Filters option, select the type you are looking for, and apply it to the backlog.  Very handy!

My Filters

With “My Filters” you can create a filter that persists so that you can apply it again and again.  “My Filters” can be created for the different drop-down values within VersionOne, even custom lists types!  The filters you create with “My Filters” can also be combined.  So, say you are identifying your stories by a particular “Type” attribute and now you want to filter the backlog to look for a certain one but only those that are high in priority.  What’s a Product Owner to do?

You can create a filter by accessing My Home-> Filters.  When you elect to add a filter, you will be presented with a window to pick and choose the values for the filter.  In the example below, I created a name for my filter and selected the appropriate values for “Type” and “Priority.”

After saving this, I can then apply this combined filter to my backlog by selecting it from the My Filters menu option under the Filter button:

My results show me the combined data that applies to that filter and, best of all, it’s there when I need to run it in the future.

In this post, I showed the example off of the Backlog grid; however, filters as described can be created and applied to any screen in the system where the data appears in a grid format.

Happy agile, everyone!