Keeping Product Backlog Healthy

Keeping a Healthy Product Backlog
Dhaval Panchal, CST and Agile Coach

Dhaval Panchal
Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Agile coach
Consults with organizations from mid-sized product companies to the Fortune 100
Experience in software development, business and functional analysis, Lean office implementations, organizational change, system architecture, business intelligence, and project management
Writes about software development and coaching on his blog(http://dhavalpanchal.gettingagile.com/)
Received his B.S. in Engineering University of Mumbai, India

Product Backlog: Point of View
Maximize ROI
Manage Risk
Balance Workload
Enhance Value

Project Vision Drives the Features
Waterfall
Agile
The Plan creates
cost/schedule estimates
The Vision creates
feature estimates
Constraints
Features
Schedule
Cost
Value / Vision
Driven
Plan
Driven
Estimates
Schedule
Cost
Features
Source: Referenced by Michelle Sliger in “Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices”

It is Impossible to Know All Requirements in Advance
It is not possible to completely specify an interactive system.
Wegner’s Lemma, 1995
Uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products.
Ziv’s Uncertainty Principle, 1996
For a new software system the requirements will not be completely known until after the users have used it.
Humphrey’s Requirements Uncertainty Principle

What Emerges?
It is impossible to know all requirements in advance
“Thinking harder” and “thinking longer” can uncover some requirements, but
Emergent requirements are those our users cannot identify in advance
Every project has some emergent requirements

Features / Functions Used in a Typical System
The biggest cost of Predictive Development is overproduction of features
Must be designed, built, and maintained
Don’t get used; provide no value
*Standish Group Study Reported in 2000 Chaos Report.
Don’t Build What Won’t Be Used

What is Product Ownership?
Agile View of Product Management
Identify partial concepts
Assess
Source: “User Stories Applied” and “Agile Estimating and Planning,” by Mike Cohn

Core Vision
Business Drives Development
Scrum considers this a good thing.
Builds a closer relationship between business and technologists.
Maintaining a healthy backlog is key to supporting business needs.

Product Backlog: Characteristics

Challenges to Healthy Backlog
Multiple lists of work
Bugs to fix
Product Features
Unfinished Product
Technical Backlog

Challenges: Multiple Backlogs
Create a single prioritized list of work:The Product Backlog
Potentially-Shippable Product Increment
Product Backlog

Challenges: Multiple backlogs
Single prioritized list
Product Owner
Sales
“Bugs List”
Biz Analysts
Etc…
Stakeholders
Architect
IT Ops
Product Features
Customer Service
Product Definition Group
Product Backlog
Technical Backlog

Challenges to healthy backlog
No stack-ranked prioritized list
Possible Causes:
Cannot compare priority for
Cannot get agreement on priority order
Features
Bugs
Technical Items
VS
VS

Challenges: Relative Priority
As a <<user>>
I want to <<goal>>
so that I can know when to expect my package
As a <<user>>
I want to <<goal>>
so that customer service receives 20 fewer calls each day
As a <<user>>
I want to <<goal>>
so that 10K concurrent user requests are handled
Cannot compare priority for
Express each item in terms of business value; aka User Story
Features
Technical Items
Bugs
VS
VS

Source: “User Stories Applied” and “Agile Estimating and Planning,” by Mike Cohn
Challenges: Relative Priority
Factors in Prioritization
Business value
Primary determinant
Ask “how much would this benefit the business,” or “how much bang for my buck?”
…don’t overlook a few other factors
Risk reduction
Change in relative cost
Learning / uncertainty
Where these come into play, items on the Product Backlog may need a boost in priority

Dot Voting Technique
Place all User Story cards on a wall
Give 4 to 5 sticky dots to each participant
Ask each participant to vote for their highest priority items. Each person can place more than one dot on a single item.
Dotted cards have higher priority than non-dotted cards, move them to separate wall.
Order backlog with most number of dots to least (1st Pass)
Go to 2 – Until all items are prioritized
Relative Priority: Getting Agreement
1st Pass
Lower Priority
Highest Priority

Product Owner Owns Product Backlog
“Collectively, the developers have a sequence in which they would like to implement the features,
as will the customer.
When there is a disagreement to the sequence,
the customer wins. Every time.
However, customers cannot prioritize without some information from the development team, it is up to the development team to provide information (assumptions, constraints, alternatives) to the customer in order to help her prioritize the features.”
Mike Cohn, User Stories Applied
Source: “User Stories Applied” by Mike Cohn

Possible Causes
Bugs or unfinished tasks during sprint
Over-specification
Too many backlog items

Challenges: Bugs/Unfinished Tasks
As a <<user>>
I want to <<goal>>
so that I can know when to expect my package
If part of a story is not done, then the entire story is not done
Re-prioritize entire story
Product Backlog
Add bugs and incomplete tasks

Challenges: Over Specification
Converting requirements docs/use cases into backlog items line-for-line makes a very large backlog.
Impossible to specify a system in its entirety.

Business Analyst’s Job
Traditional
Agile
Create Understanding
Create Documents

Game of asteroids
http://www.agileiq.org/2009/05/29/asteroids/

Backlog not ready for team
Possible Causes
Difficulty splitting larger user stories
Not enough information to begin development

User Story Splitting “Smells”
Split along process lines
Design, code, test, document
Split across architecture lines
Database, Business Tier, UI
“Big picture” of the original story is lost
Individual stories no longer have clear customer value

How to Split Stories
Data boundaries
Just show the record ID, don’t link systems yet
Operational boundaries
Implement “Read”, then “Create/Delete”
Exceptions and Error handling
Do the “happy path” first
Removing cross-cutting concerns
Establish end-to-end with dummy data
Stub out complexity

Special-Purpose Story Types
SPIKE
A quick and dirty implementation, designed to be thrown away, to gain knowledge
Indicator: Unable to estimate a user story effectively
RESEARCH
Broad, foundational knowledge-gaining to decide what to spike or to give the ability to estimate
Indicator: Don’t know a potential solution
TRACER BULLET
Narrow implementation in production quality of an epic/large user story
Indicator: User story is too large, hard to estimate

Challenges: Not Enough Information
Need clear acceptance criteria
Objectively determine – Have we built the right thing?
Need to be sufficient to test the feature
Backlog grooming is key
Team has a chance to ask questions
Makes differing assumptions visible
Give Product Owner pre-planning feedback
Time to clarify stories
Protects prioritization by customer value

Grooming for Backlog Readiness
Product Backlog items must be understandable by both the team and the Product Owner
Team invests 5-10% of their capacity working with the Product Owner to prepare for the next Sprint
A suggested approach
Meet about 2-days before end of Sprint
PO has about 1.5x the number of stack-ranked stories
Acceptance Criteria are adjusted and agreed on
Team estimates
Split stories
Re-Prioritize

Summary: Healthy Backlog
Have a single product backlog
Stack-ranked prioritized list
Use User Stories to compare by business value
Product Owner has final say on priority
Keep the Product Backlog reasonably sized
Put unfinished Stories back on the backlog
Don’t over-specify low-priority items
Groom the backlog before Sprint Planning
Split large user stories along business value lines
Stories must have acceptance criteria

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Keeping Product Backlog Healthy

by dhaval.r.panchal on Jul 10, 2009

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