Groom With A View

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Estimating   Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

The process of refining requirements to the point that they are ready to be worked upon is known as ‘backlog grooming.’ But this task accomplishes more than clarifying requirements; it informs stakeholders, contributes to the project plan, and reinforces Agile principles in general. Here’s guidance on how and when it should be done.

One of the most helpful innovations of the Agile family of practices is the concept of a product backlog. In the past, the backlog of requirements existed in a document — usually called something like a Business Requirements Document (BRD) — that contained fully specified needs for the product based on whatever information the business owner had at the time. The backlog, then, was whatever was in the document that was not yet completed. This is actually quite simple; if the document has 50 items in it, and three of them are complete, then the backlog consists of 47 more items. The team better get working.

This is definitely a case where simple does not equate to better, however. Agile practitioners hold two things to be true: products turn out better when we work together, and we should embrace the idea that requirements are changing all the time. The simple process of spending weeks or months creating a huge document that is then handed off to developers not only violates both principles, it fully misses the point of how to …

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