For those of you who come from Scrum, not having a proper backlog may feel uncomfortable, or perhaps as your project grows, having all the new issues being displayed on the Kanban board in the Backlog column becomes too unwieldy. The good news is, Jira supports a hybrid methodology of Kanban and Scrum, called Kanplan, which lets you have a backlog for Kanban as well.

To add a Scrum style backlog to your Kanban project, simply map the appropriate status into the Kanban backlog column by going through the following steps:

1. Browse to your project's agile board.
2. Click on the Board menu and select the Configure option.
3. Select the Columns option from the left navigation panel. By default, there is a column called Backlog.
4. Delete the Backlog column.
5. Drag and drop the now unmapped Backlog status from the Unmapped Statuses column on the right to the Kanban backlog on the left, as shown in the following screenshot:

With a status mapped in the Kanban backlog column, you will now have a backlog that looks and works just like a Scrum project, and any newly created issues will be added to the backlog since they will be in the Backlog workflow status, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can map more than one status to the backlog, and as we will see in Chapter 7, Workflow and Business Process, when we cover workflows in depth, you might have a more complex process, and issues in different statuses can appear in the backlog. Another benefit of having a backlog for Kanban is that if you have hundreds of issues, it is a lot faster and more efficient for Jira to display them this way than on the Kanban board, and Jira 8 has made significant improvements to the backlog's performance.