This article discusses the the role of the Product Owner in moving a backlog item to done. It explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.

Uncertainty in Product Backlog is a big risk for the project schedule. The problem is that the full scope of the release can be quite hard to estimate because the requirements are not well-know early on. Confounding this problem is that frequently the release date is a hard deadline. This means that a team must perform an unknown about of work in a fixed amount of time. The “Cone of Uncertainty” describes the reduction of the uncertainty about scope after each iteration. At the uncertainty is eliminated and the exact …

In the past, the Scrum Guide consistently used the word “priority” for the Product Backlog or noted that the Product Backlog was “prioritized.” While the Product Backlog must be ordered, prioritization is only one technique and rarely a good one to achieve this objective. The new Scrum Guide instead uses the term ordered for the Product Backlog.

A survey says that 64% of the functionalities included in software products are never or almost never used! In this blog post, Emiliano Soldi shares some ideas on how to avoid this and prioritize user stories.

Successful agile architecture requires an architect who understands agile de­velopment. This article discusses the interactions between architecture and agile software development. It explains how the architecture activities impact the product backlog and the sprint planning.

This post presents a structured and hierarchical product backlog board that considers non-functional requirements and display high priority items that are ready to code.

This article explains how product backlog grooming works, shares advice on discovering and describing product backlog items, and on structuring the product backlog. ScrumMasters, coaches, team members will also benefit from reading the extract as managing the product backlog is teamwork in Scrum.

Some people want to take the stance that no work should be done in advance of the sprint. That is clearly untenable. To see why, let’s take that view to its extreme: If we did nothing in advance to understand what we’re building, we’d show up at the planning meeting and say, “Hey, what should we build this sprint? We were working on an eCommerce site yesterday, but I think maybe we should switch to writing a word processor…” The team would literally have …

Dave Prior explains the concept of a product backlog.

The article “Managing the Pipeline” by Mary Poppendieck discuss the project planning and usage of resources. Exhorting workers to estimate more carefully and project mangers to be more diligent in meeting deadlines is not going to remove variation from projects. We need to change the rules of the game!