Made a list of some backlog gotchas and challenges for a friend.
Keep an eye out for these things. Without the right love, backlogs can cause more problems than they solve.
- Unclear sense of commitment level for a task or goal.
- To-do, to-consider, to-try, to talk about, to achieve? All valid in context
- Unclear distinction between problems to solve, solution ideas, guesses, and goals/measurements. Unclear distinctions between why, who, what, and how
- Inflexible to the idea of experimentation (multiple experiments w/one learning goal)
- Unclear relationships between items (nesting, siblings, etc.)
- “Project” vs. “product” issues. Is this a “project backlog”?
- Spec masked as backlog. Might as well write a spec :)
- Different scopes for prioritization (dumping ground, vs. ordered list)
- Overlaps with roadmap, user story map, one-pagers, and other artifacts
- “I’ll add it to the backlog” can be completely meaningless
- Inconsistent use of progressive decomposition
- Obscures multiple queues, classes of work, etc. Should be multiple queues (but prioritized in one list apples-to-apples)
- Pressure to solution vs. describing goals and JIT brainstorming. Can encourage premature convergence. Obscures the original objective, and decreases opportunity to contribute new ideas
- Easy to add items. Should add items only as fast as team finishes work
- Becomes dumping ground for notes, research, and reminders
- Quality should be constant priority … not a shuffle-able concern
- Does item align with team mission? How? Backlog != vision or mission
- People outside team can easily misinterpret backlog
- “The backlog” is just too simplistic for modern software product development