Standard practice in agile development includes creating and maintaining a product backlog instead of a set of requirements documents. A backlog offers numerous benefits, including lightweight upkeep, high visibility for both team and stakeholders, clear prioritization, and the basis for release planning.
A well-maintained backlog has the DEEP properties: Detailed appropriately, Estimated, Emergent, and Prioritized. It changes over time to reflect changes due to new customer insights, adoption or development of technology, updated business priorities, and so on. Unlike with typical requirements documents, it is a living document, constantly changing to incorporate and reflect the latest understanding of those who produce and work from its contents.
Stakeholders sometimes complain that items stay in the backlog for a very long time, often lamenting the lack of delivery capacity to complete everything in the backlog. In doing so they overlook one of the most fundamental and important features of a backlog: things fall off the bottom.
Items in the backlog are generally ideas or proposals for development, not development commitments. New ideas arise all the time, and prioritization may insert them above other longer-standing items in the backlog. As a result some backlog items may never rise high enough in priority to be picked up for active development. Ideas that languish in the backlog may be good, just not good enough relative to other ideas to achieve priority. If an idea sits in the backlog long enough, it clearly will never achieve sufficient priority for development.
Leaving such items on the backlog makes the backlog stale, turning it into a wish list for development rather than a genuine reflection of current product plans. Purge languishing items as part of backlog grooming to keep your backlog fresh. Start by removing any item older than some threshold age. If you miss an item, add it back. You likely will not miss purged items, and will benefit from freeing the backlog of clutter that does not lead to customer value. Regular purging helps both stakeholders and teams to focus their efforts on the lively and fresh ideas in a backlog. Add purging of stale items to your backlog grooming practices today.
Written by William Baxter
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