Mainline

Ticket Museum

See also: Story Mapping

What it is

The museum is your Jira backlog, frozen. Every ticket you bring in becomes an exhibit: read only, searchable, filterable, and off the map. Nothing becomes a story until someone promotes it, one at a time, with a title written as a story and the ticket cruft left behind.

A backlog of hundreds of tickets stops being a plan and starts being an archive. The museum treats it as one. The team pulls out what it will actually do next, and lets the rest go with a reason attached. On the projects we've tested, most of the backlog never needed to come across.

Getting the CSV out of Jira

  1. In Jira, open Filters and then View all issues (Jira Cloud), or Issues and then Search for issues (Jira Server and Data Center).
  2. Switch to JQL and search for the backlog you want to bring: 
    project = SHOP AND statusCategory != Done ORDER BY created DESC
  3. Choose Export and then Export CSV (all fields), so descriptions, labels, comments, parents and links come with it.
  4. In Mainline, open the museum from your team navigation, choose Acquire from Jira, and drop the file on the page.

A file holds up to 1,000 issues and 10 MB. More than that? Narrow the search, for example with AND created < "2025-01-01", and acquire each file in turn. Bringing the same tickets again refreshes them rather than duplicating them.

The file needs the Issue key, Summary and Issue Type columns. Comma, semicolon and tab separated files all work. Issues with a resolution, or whose status category is Done, are counted and left out: finished work is not museum material.

Acquiring

Nothing enters the museum on upload. The file is catalogued first and you see what would happen: how many new exhibits, how many existing ones refreshed from the newer file, how many left as they are because they were already promoted or stored, how many finished, and how many rows turned away. Then you acquire it or turn it down.

Rows without a usable key, type or summary are turned away rather than failing the whole file. They are listed with the reason, and you can download them as a CSV, fix them in a spreadsheet and acquire the file again.

An acquisition can be returned afterwards. Returning removes the exhibits it added and puts the refreshed ones back as they were. Anything promoted or stored since stays where it is. A file left waiting is turned down automatically after a day.

What happens to each Jira type

Story, Bug, Task, Spike
An exhibit, shown with its type, labels, epic and age. Any of them can be promoted.
Sub-task
Kept with its parent and shown under it. Sub-tasks are never promoted on their own; the parent is.
Epic
A filter and a grouping. An epic is not promoted either. Its stories are, and they find their place on the map under an activity.

The list is filtered by status (on display, promoted, in storage, kept, everything), type, label, epic and age, and searched by key, summary or description. Opening an exhibit shows the whole relic: description, sub-tasks, links and comments, as Jira had them.

Promoting

Promote puts a story on the map. You pick the step it belongs under, write the title as a story, and optionally add scenarios as given, when, then. The story carries nothing else from Jira: no description, no comments, no attachments. The exhibit stays in the museum, linked to the story, as the read-only source if anyone needs to look.

Several tickets that are really one piece of work can be promoted together into one story, or added to a story that already exists on the map. A promote can be undone, which sends the exhibit back to the museum.

Letting go

After each acquisition, and every night, the curator looks over the exhibits on display and suggests what to let go, in groups with a reason:

Untouched for over a year
No progress, no comments and no edits in a year. The team has got by without it all that time.
Probably the same ticket twice
Near-identical summaries of the same type. Keep the one with more detail.
Bugs nobody could reproduce
Someone said it couldn't be reproduced, and nothing happened after that.
Too vague to act on
A few words and no description.
Already covered by a promoted story
Jira links them to an exhibit you have already promoted, and they add no behaviour of their own.

You review each group, let go of what you agree with, and keep what you don't. A kept exhibit is not suggested again. Exhibits let go land in storage with the reason as a note, so the in-storage view can be narrowed by why, and a batch can be undone. You can also tick any exhibits yourself and send them to storage without waiting for the curator.

What it does not do