Recently we've started an experiment that everyone on the team (six devs) pull the top item off the backlog regardless of what it is. For context we maintain eight existing services that compose of frontend/backend components and we usually work on 2 new projects while fixing and added to those other services. 

In practice what this would mean is dev1 could pull a bug first, then a frontend task on project 1 and then a backend task in project 2 and on and on. This constant context switching seems like it might be counter productive but I can't find any resources to back that theory up. The reasoning for this experiment is to make the devs sure that all the tickets are well scoped with enough context so any dev that hasn't worked on the project before could pick it up and work on it.

Because I can't find a lot of examples of how people manage and maintain kanban boards I'm having a hard time providing data to this discussion but it just feels inefficient. Does anyone have experience with this, is this a good/bad approach, are there any resources about this I can read?