Friday, October 30, 2009

Product Backlogs

These days there are so many discussions on how many product backlogs to use, what to put in the backlog and who should be able to update the backlog.

I see the experts weighing in on this topic and I begin wonder if they have put their advice to practical use. Having used a single product backlog and multiple product backlogs for a large number of iterations over the years I feel that my experience and intuition is to not follow their advice of a single backlog.

Let's weigh out some of the benefits of a single backlog:
  • Single place for all of your user stories.... Check
  • Single priority list.... Check

That's where it starts to break down for me. Beyond these two significant advantages I'm at odds to call the rest of the reasons benefits.

What are some of the disadvantages:

  • A single point of access; unless you want to buy a tool to manage this you'll need to manage access to the file manually; usually a file share or a single person to make changes to the document.
  • There are rarely if ever a single priority list.
  • Because some stories are a better fit for a specific team due to subject knowledge the stories are rarely if ever taken in priority order.

In my experience I find that if you have a consistent team and team skills remain largely unchanged it's best to have one backlog per team. This also takes effort because you need to communicate effectively among the other stakeholders on your priorities and dependencies. Something also required for a single backlog. Allowing teams to focus is important and a backlog per team that contains the list of prioritized stories and defects is a great way to make that happen. In your team backlog you would find all of your team's stories and defects along with work other teams require you to do to support them. This dependency is implied in a single backlog due to the relative priority but fails due to the fact that teams aren't interchangeable.

I know my position is a bit controversial and I look forward to hearing your comments.