Are you managing your backlog well enough?
July 17, 2007
A very valid point made by the following post Is Agile Enough? (part 1)
Therein lies the key omission of Scrum (and most other agile methods): The backlog of user stories are taken as a starting point. They are not examined for their “quality”, “completeness”, “cluefulness”, budget impact, etc. The user stories are assumed “good”, and used as an “input” to the Scrum process.
(… good read …)
Does your request tracker allow you to have hierarchical requests so you could be breaking down original user stories and requirements into more detailed tasks suitable for iteration planning?
Does it track the duplicate requests so you could see the most popular requests and prioritize accordingly?
Does it allow you to specify dependencies between requests and respect those in iteration plans and project deadline estimations?
Does it allow your customers selectively (in “controlled by you” fashion) access the request records to give you more feedback regarding the content and priorities?
Check out a demo account at www.yoxel.com to see how Yoxel request tracking system can help you do all that within agile environment.
