Sorry I wasn't very clear on point 1. It's really just a way to manage the backlog - so that stories that are in a future release remain on the product backlog, whilst stories for the current release are in the release backlog. That way, when doing iteration planning, you don't have to pick them from an enormous list. Drag and drop prioritisation (point 2) might go some way to solve this, but it's also good to have an idea of what is roughly in scope for any given release.

Point 2, yes I think this might work. 

Thanks for considering our feedback.

Ian

Thanks for your prompt reply - it must be a challenge managing everyones individual requests, but hopefully these dialogues will help you find a simple solution that works for most people.

To you points

1. Managing features by sprint. What you are proposing may work. Here's an example scenario:

Theme : User login/logout

Story 1: As a user I want to be able to login and logout...

Story 2: As a user I want to be able to click a forgot password link...

Story 3: As an enterprise user, I want to be able to login and logout with my organisations single sign on....

As you can see, Story 1 might be in an early release, whilst Story 2 might come in a later release and so on. Perhaps we're not using Theme's as intended?

2. Risk & business value: Yes this approach say with a value 1 to 100 per story might work. If we have a huge backlog, it really helps to be able to focus on what is going into the next release by organising by business value and risk. It also then help to prioritise which stories should be started first in any given release. It's much quicker to set a value whilst creating the story than to re-read each story every time. Again, perhaps there is another way to solve this problem?

Thanks,

Ian.

1. Some way of managing features by release rather than sprint. Either with something like a theme which was the release scope or by creating another backlog which is the master backlog and allowing stories to be easily copied into a release specific backlog.

2. Some way of specifying risk and business value fields to aid with prioritisation of stories.

Thanks,

Ian.