I noticed some development teams completely remove Jira issues from their project when they decide not to work on those tasks anymore. This approach seems wrong to me and I disagree with this practice. I think we should keep all issues for tracking purposes even if we won’t implement them. What’s your opinion on this topic? Do you have any good reasons for or against removing unwanted issues? Has anyone dealt with similar situations where your team decided to abandon certain tickets? I’m curious about different approaches and what works best in practice.
Having been part of various scrum teams, I’ve found that simply keeping abandoned issues can lead to more complications than anticipated. It’s crucial to manage these issues effectively instead of deleting them outright. We typically move unwanted tickets to a different project or label them as ‘rejected’ or ‘deferred,’ providing clear reasons for this decision. This method helps maintain an audit trail while preventing backlog clutter. From my experience, an overloaded backlog can prolong sprint planning and confuse new team members. However, deleting issues isn’t the answer either, as it risks losing valuable context about past product decisions and stakeholder requests that may resurface later.
The real issue isn’t keeping or deleting tickets - it’s that everyone’s manually managing this chaos.
I’ve watched teams burn hours in sprint planning arguing over dead tickets. Some mark them “won’t do,” others invent custom statuses. Everyone’s got their own system.
What actually works: automate everything. Set rules that move stale issues based on age, priority, and activity. Build workflows that archive old stuff to separate projects after set timeframes. Create reports tracking why issues die so you can spot patterns.
Consistent automated rules are key. No manual decisions per ticket. No bloated backlogs. No lost context since everything gets categorized and archived properly.
I rolled this out for our team and killed those painful backlog grooming sessions. Issues get sorted, archived, and tracked without anyone touching them.
Latenode makes setup dead simple. Connect Jira with other tools and build workflows that handle this automatically.
I’ve worked with several product teams and found a solid middle-ground approach. Don’t delete abandoned issues - mark them “Closed - Will Not Do” and move them to a separate board or filtered view. They’re out of your active sprint planning but still accessible for reference. Here’s why this works: stakeholders constantly circle back to previously rejected features, especially during annual planning. Having those original requirements and acceptance criteria saves tons of time when similar requests pop up again. One more tip - add quick closure notes explaining why each ticket got abandoned. These notes are gold during retrospectives and help new team members understand past product decisions without hunting down the original stakeholders.