The Agile Pocket Guide: A Quick Start to Making Your Business Agile Using Scrum and Beyond

Chapter 8

Discoveries from the Product Backlog

The Product Backlog is a list of all the tasks the Agile Team will work on for a particular project. After giving the orders of work and the priority of those orders, a Product Owner will walk to the Product Backlog and post them. All team members go to the Product Backlog for their work orders. This backlog is centrally located so that no one has an excuse for not knowing what to do, and it is ever-growing and changing for each project. (The Product Backlog is never complete.) At the beginning of a project, the Product Owner meets with the Agile Team and you, its Leader, to discuss the overall project and the highest-level details of what needs to be built.

Some teams have called this initial meeting a discovery meeting. Discovery meetings are usually pretty short, and the team doesn't spend too much time at them, although they may cover everything from the features and functions that will be built out for the project. One way to start building out the Product Backlog is to fill it up with as many requirements as a certain project may demand (see Figure 8.1) and then break them out into different user stories, or tasks (more on this in Chapter 9). As this list grows, you'll probably want to add some grouping mechanisms to organize the work. The use of tags, or group names, is a good way to start.

Figure 8.1 A Packed Product Backlog Needing to be Completed for a Release

The Product Owner, who also owns the Product Backlog, must: ...