Clean out that massive backlog

How to attack that massive backlog of 1000+ tickets that your team has methodically piled up? You and your team knows it’ll be next to impossible to ever work on it all, and a lot is probably outdated?

Set up a new project going forward, start with a complete purge. Depending on the outcome of the old project, you can always move tickets that make it through back into the new project, and this forces teams to really prioritize.

Filter by last modified date, so only keep the most recent tickets

I’d add that you must have Product Owners participate, and prework also is probably needed to group tickets by team or product. This way you can allocate time for each group, say 10-15 minutes, for those tickets. This also subtly encourages some gamification - who can clear out their backlog first!

Set aside, really you have to force this, set aside an hour on Friday afternoon to work your way through the backlog. Set up rules for purging:

• can’t remember the purpose of the ticket, close it
• ticket not clear or missing details to work with, close it

It’s good to set a time limit: team gets 5 seconds to scan and thumbs up/down. If you can set this up as a temporary ritual you can grind through the backlog in a quarter or less. It becomes cathartic, almost like team doomscrolling, and everyone will feel better having participated.