Organising your backlog
- Richard
- Feb 21, 2020
- 4 min read
Do you need to untangle your backlog, or are you just starting and have no idea how to keep things organised? Let me help you with cleaning up, organising your epics, your features and your user stories. The benefits are well worth it.
I can imagine it being a bit much. You have projects, product improvements, bugs, architectural improvements and whatnot to put somewhere on your backlog, and all you have is Epics, Features and User stories. You might have tried making epics related to different modules, or just tried to use epics as categories like one for projects and one for improvements. It all just doesn't really work out, your backlog is ever growing and it's hard to keep track of everything on it.
Cleaning up. First thing's first. Let's clean up what you've done so far. Find all the items that haven't been touched for about half a year and you know aren't part of future projects. Good job, next is finding all items of which you're not sure if they're already done or not. Perfect. Now send all the stakeholders their items with the question if it's still relevant. Collect the feedback, maybe send out a reminder, then close everything that's no longer relevant or where you haven't received a reaction to. Ideally choose a closing option that shows you closed it cleaning up the backlog so they're easily traceable. I know some might worry about just throwing things off of the backlog, but really don't. If it is something that is required, it'll come back to you eventually, and then you'll be able to give it a proper place so it'll actually happen.
Alright! So now everything that is on your backlog is something that actually needs to happen, it's no longer filled with things that would be nice but were never going to happen anyway. Remember this is a lot less work if you clean up once every 6 months. Next up is setting up the epics.
Epics. What commonly happens is that epics are not specifically defined and constantly added to. When you do this, you are never going to close them. We don't want that. We want to be able to close as many things as possible and start new ones. Unfortunately there are some you have to keep open forever, but we will fix that with features.
Make an epic for:
architecture
every project that you have that has been paid for already
every project that you have that is proposed to the customer
every project that you have that is an internal upgrade
improvements that are asked for, but aren't part of a project
technical debt
Try adding the estimates to the epics and don't forget to put the projects requirements in the epic as well.
The result might look something like this:
Features. Now let's start adding features to the epics. This might be a little bit harder, but let's give it a go.
For Architecture, I propose making a feature for every piece of architecture you have, for instance Databases, Mailservers, Platform and Certificates.
For Improvements and Technical debt I suggest organising it with features that clearly tell you which part of the product you're talking about. Examples would be Mail, Dashboard and Client portal.
Last but not least, projects. This might be the easiest one, try to look at features as milestones.
Again, add the estimates where possible and you might start to look like this:
User stories. Remember I told you not to use user stories? I still think you shouldn't but this is the name most applications give you for the items you're going to place under your features. You can combine as many scenario's as needed to get to a point where the item has become a small deliverable package for the customer.
Place these little packages under the features that best fit them. Do not leave any items hanging in nothingness, always connect them to a higher level item.
Why? You might be wondering why my advice would be to handle your backlog like this. It gives a lot of advantages and I've seen its benefits in practice.
It helps with planning. You know how much effort each project would take and you know your velocity. This way you can tell your customers when you have room for the project they're thinking of buying. It gives you an overview.
When starting a new project, you can look at the architectural and product improvements, even at the technical debt, to see if you can incorporate some of these items within the new project. You don't want to blow up the project, but you do wanna take along other improvements instead of leaving them open forever. Because you basically filed them in to product sections, they should be easy to find. If you do decide to include it in the project, move them over to the project epic.
There aren't many things that give as much satisfaction to a product owner as to close something on the backlog. Having delivered a job well done and having a moment where you officially close something help you as a person.
Keeping the overview, keeping it fresh and simple, closing projects when they're finished, being able to predict. These are all benefits you gain from working like this, and if that's not enough it will give you renewed energy on top of that.
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