Technical debt is the necessary maintenance and bugs the development team deals with to keep the product running. Real-world examples underscore the extensive range of backlog utilization. Because they’re often used to capture every idea for product-related tasks, backlogs can quickly get unwieldy.
This helps set expectations with stakeholders and other teams, especially when they bring additional work to you, and makes what are accrued expenses engineering time a fixed asset. A product backlog is a great tool for ordering work and being transparent about what may get done. It also helps people understand what work won’t get done because it doesn’t align with the larger product goal. If you don’t have a product backlog yet, it’s an easy way to get started with scrum and will bring a lot of clarity and organization to the way you work. Set up your next software project quickly with Jira’s Scrum Template and visualize, manage, and track work from sprint to sprint. Easily create a scrum backlog to build a queue of issues and start planning and executing sprints.
In this case, the team needs to balance the immediate value of user-facing features with the long-term benefits of improving platform performance. Prioritization will depend on how the performance tasks impact user experience and overall product stability. The backlog is a readily available, readily comprehensive list of work both parties can look at as they discuss whether a new work request for the team can be brought in.
Tips and tricks for writing good product backlogs in scrum
Story points offer a way to measure effort without getting bogged down in exact timelines, allowing teams to focus on delivering results efficiently. To get the most out of a product backlog, it’s important to understand its key components. A well-structured backlog includes several elements, each playing a specific role in driving the Agile process forward. A user story is a way to express the work from a user’s point of view, which can be a valuable way to communicate the work to all team members. Not everything on the backlog needs to be expressed as a user story; it’s perfectly acceptable to mix user stories and non-user stories together. There’s value in having work in a single place so both the team and stakeholders have visibility into the work and progress toward the product goal.
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Once you’ve collected user requirements, it’s time to break down larger features or epics into smaller, actionable user stories. This makes the work easier to estimate and tackle while keeping the team focused on delivering incremental value. The backlog isn’t just about individual tasks — it reflects the broader product roadmap.
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- If you use them effectively, they can help you accurately predict future sprints and manage expectations.
- In addition to these tactical benefits, you can hold periodic grooming sessions.
- Sprint backlogs help you structure your team’s work before, during, and after a sprint.
- The order of items in the product backlog can make or break a project’s success.
High-priority tasks are selected for the scrum sprint during sprint planning. Tasks come from the product backlog which is prioritized during backlog grooming. Within the business sector, project management teams frequently maintain product backlogs to monitor features, enhancements, and bug fixes required in software development. These backlogs function as a prioritized task list that guides the team in efficiently delivering value to customers. A backlog is a list of tasks required to support a larger strategic plan. For example, a product development context contains a prioritized list of items.
Technical debt, like financial debt, “accrues interest” when ignored. When developers push technical work to the bottom of the product backlog, it builds up and becomes harder to accomplish. Effective backlog management can prevent the buildup of technical debt.
While any development team can utilize a product backlog, they are most commonly used by Agile teams and Scrum teams to organize and prioritize work. Product teams that use the agile development framework divide their work into sprints. These are short development time blocks, usually, a couple of weeks or a month, during which the team works on a limited set of tasks.
When managing a Scrum team of developers, staying organized is crucial for product success. This universal repository contains every possibility for what the product may add or change in the future. New ideas get added as feedback from the market, and customers continually roll in through various channels. When Apple (AAPL) debuted the iPhone X, a 10th-anniversary edition of the iPhone, in October 2017, overwhelming initial demand for the phone created a weeks-long backlog on pre-orders. Apple was forced to delay shipments to late November and then again to December for customers pre-ordering the phone upon launch.
