I've been wondering lately if Scrum is on the verge of getting a new standard meeting--the Backlog Grooming Meeting, which is a meeting an increasing number of teams are doing each sprint to make sure the product backlog is prepared and ready for the start of the next sprint. To see why a Backlog Grooming Meeting may be a few years away from becoming a Generally Accepted…

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I want to show a real easy way to put user stories in a spreadsheet-based product backlog. I wrote this after seeing someone tweet a screen capture of a product backlog I made 9 years ago and thought to myself, "Yikes, that's out of date for how I do it today..." As you probably know I'm a big fan of writing the product backlog in the form of user stories and of writing user…

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The weather turned nice about two weeks ago, which meant it was time for spring cleaning about the Cohn home, affectionately known as the Cohnderosa (which will only mean something if you're old enough to remember "Bonanza"). While washing the windows around the outside of the house I had plenty of time to think about spring cleaning I'd also just helped a couple of clients…

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Product backlog items can be ideally written to be independent. It is the hallmark of a good team that its members can implement product backlog items in any order. However, it would be nearly impossible to remove all dependencies between product backlog items and so our goal becomes minimizing important dependencies rather than eliminating them altogether. But any…

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Teams used to a sequential development process have become accustomed to hand-offs between specialists. Analysts hand their work to designers who hand it to programmers who pass it on to testers. Each of these hand-offs includes some overhead in the form of meetings, documents to read and perhaps sign, and so on. In part because of this overhead, the hand-offs tend to be of…

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Roman Pichler, author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love, and I use the acronym DEEP to summarize key attributes of a good product backlog.

• Detailed Appropriately. User stories on the product backlog that will be done soon need to be sufficiently well understood that they can be completed in the coming sprint. Stories that will not…

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Agile project management approaches favor an incremental, just-in-time approach to design. As such, Scrum projects do not have an upfront analysis or design phase; all work occurs within the repeated cycle of sprints. This does not mean, however, that design on a Scrum project is not intentional. An intentional design process is one in which the design is guided through…

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A common agile project management question is whether bugs belong on the product backlog. Before I address that question, let me clarify that the question refers to bugs that are unrelated to functionality being coded during the sprint. If someone finds a bug during a sprint that is related to the features being worked on, the best thing to do is yell, "Hey, Mike, the boojum…

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As you may now, I am working on a new book, which will be called Succeeding with Agile. I recently finished writing a chapter for it on the impact of the human resources and facilities groups on an organization that is transitioning to an Agile project management approach. While writing that chapter, I put together a list of all the things that I think should be visible within…

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I haven't heard the term "release backlog" in many months, but it's come up in three conversations over the past week. So, I want to share my thoughts on whether a team using an Agile project management approach should have a Release Backlog in addition to the conventional Product and Sprint (or Iteration) Backlogs.

First, let's clarify what people mean when they refer to…

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