DEV Community: Ivana Vnucec

How to Calculate Velocity for the First Sprint?

Ivana Vnucec — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:56:05 +0000

We all want to improve our productivity or in the development language - maximize sprint velocity. After a couple of sprints, you can estimate how much time you will need for upcoming sprints. But, how to calculate velocity sprinting for the first sprint?

Why is it hard?

In sprints that are not first, the team can use past velocities to estimate. Past record and data helps to make a plan and have a more clear vision about the progress. Sometimes, the velocities from previous projects can help to predict velocities for new projects.

However, not all projects are similar. That means that it is often not a reliable way of estimation. Even bigger problems occur when a team is new or using new technology. Past data is not available. Using data from other teams can be a way to go but often you don't have enough information about their performance.

Calculating first sprint velocity

To avoid uncertainty, there are some methods of how calculating velocity for the first sprint. They follow steps:

Calculate the Capacity

When calculating the number of hours you have to make your project, don’t expect you will be productive 100% of the hours. Remember, your team has emails to answer, scrum meetings to participate in, and lunch breaks to refresh.

That’s why you can take 80% of the total capacity of working hours. So, let’s say that:

Developers - 200 hours
QA (Quality Assurance) - 120 hours
UAT (User Acceptance Testing) - 60 hours

Connect Amount of Time for Each User Story

User stories might need multiple disciplines and more than one member of the development team to be finished. Write how much time does it take for each discipline and each team member to finish a user story. For example:

User story #1 takes 20 hours of the development team, 16 hours of the Quality Assurance team, and 4 hours of User Acceptance Testing.

Connect capacity with availability

The next step is to connect the estimated effort for each user story or requirement to team capacity (80%). Here it is important not to make slowdowns in the estimation. Remember you already left 20% of the capacity out of the calculation.

Also, since there is not much progress planned for the first sprint, you can save some time if you do more than planned in the first sprint. Planning the first sprint slower is one of the ways to prevent snow plowing in agile.

Assigning Members to User Stories

You assign stories that are in the beginning of the plan to team members. They commit to user stories or requirements. Don't forget that there will never be 100% utilization and that's not the intent.

Eventually, this should show you how many story points are committed by team members. In the end you can see the total story points committed by the whole team in the first sprint.

How to estimate story points?

Story points are metrics in Agile that help to understand the estimate of the story difficulty. In other words, it is a number that shows how challenging and complex a certain story is. Development teams use them in order to determine the time needed for each story.

There are few ways to do it. One of them is to use Fibonacci sequence numbers. It stands for a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. They go like: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.

In Agile,

the sequence is usually modified to 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. Estimating story points with these numbers is easier than thinking about the difference between two close story points.

When estimating, make sure you think about the value of each story. Here, relative values are more important than raw values.

Calculate velocity from the story points

After you know story points, it is time to put them all together and finally estimate the team velocity. After estimating story points you will be able to estimate the amount of hours your team needs for the first sprint.

For example, if a team can work 100 hours, and an hour per story point is 5, then velocity is approximately 20. It would be more relevant to express it as a range instead of a single number. For example 18 - 22.

To Wrap Up

Discuss whether each of those work items had a similar level of effort. If not, discuss why. Use that insight in future estimation discussions.

Like everything else in agile, estimation is a practice. You'll get better and better with time.

Productivity Tools for Software Development Teams in 2022

Ivana Vnucec — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 16:14:52 +0000

As remote work became an everyday reality for many of the tech companies, the need to keep the team on the same page has grown accordingly. It is easier than ever to fail in sufficiently communicating project requirements, being in sync with the rest of the team, and keeping productivity high. Productivity tools for software teams help to make that road easier.

Let's see some interesting ones and how they can help your team!

Productivity in software development

Now, the question many ask is what is productivity in software development without the tools. Can we define it as lines of code, amount of commits, number of pull requests or code reviews? Productivity in software development can measure:

Amount of commits
Average commit size
Duration of the review process
Frequency of code reviews
Amount of code reviews

The truth is, there are developers doing many different kinds of work and not all development processes can be generalized.

In agile development, teams have been using sprint velocity as a measurement for productivity. Sprint velocity is a simple calculation that measures units of work finished in a period of time. It helps teams to have an overview of cycle time and how to improve it. In this method, short periods of time are called sprints and they usually last 2 weeks. Smaller units of work are called “story points”.

However, teams have different types of work which causes dissatisfaction if measuring their work with the same measurement. Consequently, some of them try to use other terms instead of velocity to track the progress.

Measuring productivity

Because of its wide range of different things to produce, it is hard to define a metric to measure the productivity of all kinds of development. For example, if you measure the number of finished tasks per developer, you will miss out on the complexity of these tasks.

In order to measure productivity in units of time, you need to pay attention to more points. Nicole Forsgren, along with other researchers from GitHub and Microsoft, tackled the issue of developer productivity by creating the SPACE framework. SPACE framework provides a holistic view of productivity and it stands for:

S: Satisfaction and well-being
P: Performance
A: Activity
C: Communication and collaboration
E: Efficiency and flow

I want to be productive (without the tool)

There are many ways you can improve your productivity in software development without a tool to help you with that. Things to notice, methods to improve your productivity are long-term and they require effort. For example, with:

Reading books about development

helps you to digest information in more meaningful ways. Engineering books are written by experienced individuals who have worked on multiple projects. Their knowledge can help you to pick up some tips and avoid pitfalls.

Getting a mentor

Helps you to understand new things you are working on. When someone mentors your progress, you will be faster in noticing mistakes and learning from them. Coding mentors go through your code, suggest new resources to learn from, and overall increase your productivity. There are many platforms that provide a base of developers available for code mentorship.

Working fewer hours a week

Makes you more focused on your tasks because of the time constraints. Moreover, with less time you are inclined towards working smart instead of working hard. When you have less time, three is also less time for bad habits in project management.

Types of productivity tools for software development teams

Indeed, for improving productivity without the tools you will need to invest a lot of effort and time. If you still want to go that way - I wish you good luck. But if you need a faster solution, there are many kinds of productivity tools for software development teams that can help you with that. I grouped them in following categories:

Software for recording and sharing information about the project
Software for collecting knowledge and managing requirements and collaboration
Software for improving code writing
Time-tracking or performance management software. Software that helps you to plan things with calendar management
Project management software or work management software for organizing the notes and requirements that have to be done
Software that improves communication between parts included in the project
Software that helps you to stay focused

In the following paragraphs, we will go through examples of this software.

Software for recording and sharing parts of your project

Before you start your project, before onboarding a new employee, showing a feature you would like to make, you will want to share some important information with other people. Often, it is easier to explain things while showing them, instead of trying to explain it in an email or message.

ScreenRec

ScreenRec is an intuitive productivity tool for software development teams that enables you to record screens with ease. To do so, it is necessary to download the tool and press Alt + S to select the part of the screen you want to record. If you want to take a screenshot, you can do it by using the same simple command Alt + S.

While recording your screen you can choose whether you want to include a facecam in your video. The audio and voice are also optional and you can turn them off and on in the video. Recorded videos don't have a limit so you can record as much as you need, with no watermarks. When you stop recording, you get a private shareable link instantly.

All videos that you made will be saved and you can reach them anytime you want. You can access them and review them whenever you need them. Already saved videos you can download in mp4 format or get the link to easily share them when necessary.

Since videos made with ScreenRec can be watched on all devices, ScreenRec really has wide use. You can watch your videos on computer desktops, tablets, smartphones and even show them to your whole team on smart TVs.

Loom

Loom is a tool that enables you to record your screen on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Chromebooks for free. It enables you to record with your camera and screen, together with the audio. Too much of synchronous communication can drag the focus so Loom makes space for your team members to communicate on their terms.

Having a video that explains in detail, yet it is not happening in real life, makes communication easier across different departments and time zones. Video captures the context, tone, and importance of the topic better so everyone from the organization can share ideas and information.

ShareX

Like Screenrec, ShareX is also a tool for screen recording and screenshots. It is an open-source and free software Microsoft Windows. The screenshots that you take can be edited, modified with borders, image effects, watermarks, etc. You can also use the editor to draw on your desktop before taking a screenshot.

After taking a photo or a video, screen photos or videos can be exported in various formats such as image files, exported to printer, to the clipboard, via FTP or generated URL. There are also other interesting features like choosing the screen color, image combiner, and thumbnails for images and videos.

Software for collecting knowledge and managing requirements and collaboration

JadeALM

JadeALM is a tool that enables you to write your requirements in a documentation editor with an automated hierarchy made. When you write requirements, they are already organized from high-level tasks to lower-level tasks. This unique feature of JadeALM makes it easy for you to track what is related to your tasks, its dependencies and the accountability of all included members. JadeALMs interface enables you to use Markdown support, use slash (/), attach files, and share mockups.

Inside the editor, you can assign tasks, comment, connect them to a timeline and see the progress of each task. If needed, you can also insert configuration or blocks of code in the editor. Code in editor has container, border, and different color of the background which makes it easier to spot from the rest of the requirements.

Notion

Notion is a tool that helps you to collect requirements in docs accessible to all team members. You can create crafts into the Notions document and then add links or photos. Requirements can be organized by status, epics, sprints, dates and other. The interface of this productivity tool for software development teams looks like a kanban board which makes it intuitive and playful.

The most important benefit of this tool is that it centralizes the information you need for doing your job. Especially for remote teams, it is important to have an accessible source of knowledge. As a developer, you can also insert blocks of code in Notion. After choosing from one of 60 programming languages, Notion does the colorful syntax for your code.

Documenting and managing your requirements well empowers you to spend more time coding and less time looking for the requirements that you need.

Confluence

Like Notion, Confluence is a collaboration tool that enables teams to share knowledge about the project. Confluence gives you space to organize project content, capture requirements, assign tasks to team members, connect tasks to dates and note the changes made along the way.

Like all tools from this group of productivity tools for development teams, its purpose is to eliminate the need to store documents in multiple software and places such as Google Drive and file folders. Unlike Notion, Confluence doesn't focus on kanban boards but is mainly a knowledge capturing tool.

Software for improving code writing

If you work with code, you know how many irregularities can appear during your work. It can be demotivating seeing a lot of bugs and issues. One of the ways to increase your productivity in code writing is to help yourself with a tool.

Vim

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. Even though it can be used for all kinds of text editing, writing emails and configuring files, it is mostly developer-focused.

It’s a modal text editor that can have multiple modes. Each of them can be optimized for a specific task. For example, you can set one mode for Python and one for C++. This feature allows one keystroke to have different behavior depending on the language, such as language-specific shortcuts.

Designed to work on nearly any major platform, it is ideal for team collaboration. Finally, Vim’s shortcuts are all configured in a sharable .vimrc. file. Sharing a file can allow you to benefit from your colleagues' experiences while keeping your personal version available for individual editing.

Atom

Atom is an open-source text editor with a wide range of plugins and themes that are easily accessible. Built with Electron, it uses web technology like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Node. It enables you to create branches, push and pull, overview pull requests, stage and commit, merge conflicts, and many others from within the editor.

It helps you to write code faster with the option to find, preview and replace letters as you type them. You can also divide Atoms interface into more panels to compare blocks of code across files.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a streamlined code editor that allows you to debug code from the editor, run tasks and have a version control. Its purpose is to help developers to have a quick code-build-debug cycle and to leave complex workflows to other tools.

You can launch or attach your running apps and debug with breakpoints, call stacks, and an interactive console. Visual Studio Code also offers you to review diffs, stage files, and make commits. It also provides extensions to add new languages, themes, debuggers, and to connect to additional services. Extensions run in separate processes, which ensures that they won't slow down your editor.

Codestream

Codestream is a software that lets you discuss code with your team members without using a pull request. You can highlight a code block that you want to discuss and insert a comment. Similar approach like JadeALM, where developers can discuss code in its environment saves time and boosts team productivity.

Time-tracking or performance management software

Harvest

Harvest is a time tracking software that helps you to track team productivity and adjust tasks accordingly. With its tracking specific tasks, you can see where the team spends the most time and improve that part of work. It also provides many integrations with other productivity tools like Asana, Slack, Jira and others.

Its simple interface enables you to track your team's progress from the web, smartphone or another application. This easy tracking is adjusted to the needs of remote work. Finally, all progress that you are able to see, you can also get in a report. Visual data in reports helps you to understand time spent per person and per project.

Hubstaff

Hubstaff is an interesting time tracking software that has GPS location included. You can use it on your desktop or as a mobile app which makes it simple to track your employees productivity. Once you connect your team members into it, you can see their digital time log, jobs and location. Since it's very simple to use for everyone, there is no need for special training.

Intuitive and simple features make Hubstaff trusted software for more than 8000 remote teams. It also provides an option of randomized screenshot to show you who is working on what. One more common feature for time-tracking software that Hubstaff also has is tracking the number of mouse movements and keyboard strokes by team members.

Time doctor

Time doctor is a time-tracking software that focuses on giving the employees insights into their strengths and weaknesses. By showing team members how the software tracks when they are overwhelmed and underutilized, their accountability and motivation increase.

Some specific features that TimeDoctor offers are screenshot recording and alerts when to avoid distractions. Measuring performance for each team member and by team progress helps to keep overall productivity.

Project management software

JadeALM

JadeALM is one of the rare project management tools that includes an automated WBS and document editor. Moreover, this productivity tool for software development teams not only provides WBS synchronized with classic kanban boards, but it keeps all the features synchronized. That means that everything you write in the document editor will also be accessible to the kanban board, timeline and WBS chart.

Its benefit to see the big picture of the project and have feature tracking instead of issue tracking, helps keeping the track of the whole project. Since the majority of all teams are multifunctional, it is very important to keep in mind the overall project, not just managing task by task.

Trello

Trello is a kanban board that many teams and individuals use for organizing their work. You can write your tasks inside of blocks on the board. From there, you can assign tasks to your teammates, add due dates, productivity metrics and calendars.

As a productivity tools for software development teams, Trello helps you with organizing your work - you have an overview of all tasks and their progress. When you open each of the cards, you can see an ecosystem of checklists, due dates, attachments, and conversations.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a tool that enables you to break up the work into smaller chunks of work. Each of them is then treated as a separate project. It has a message board where you can post announcements and ideas, together with progress updates and comments.

Some other features that Basecamp provides are to-do lists and a place for sharing docs and files. In the to-do list you can assign tasks, set deadlines and start discussions. Docs and Files are there for you to share images, spreadsheets and organize them in folders. Other than these, Basecamp also has a group chat and automatic check-ins for recurring questions.

Software for communication

Slack

Especially in the terms of remote work, it is crucial to balance the communication between synchronous and asynchronous channels of communication. Slack is one of the most popular tools for communication, messaging and collaboration. It is built as a virtual office where you can create channels and groups of people. It is mostly used as an instant messaging app, but it also has features for video calls and group conferences.

Other than a tool for team communication and collaboration, it works as an individual synching. You can create private and public channels for you and your team members where you can connect information from multiple projects and threads. Second, Slack lets you customize colors of the left sidebar improving user experience.

Fleep

Offering a layout similar to Slack, Fleep is also a communication tool that helps productivity for software development teams and keep up with the work together. Each conversation has a pinboard, where you can highlight discussions, plans or decisions.

Moving beyond discussion, you can set up tasks to organize and coordinate upcoming work. It’s accessible on mobile as well as web. A very helpful feature that Fleep offers is to communicate with clients and consultants using Fleep outside your company without having to sign into a separate workspace.

Flock

No, I don't think about flock of sheeps when I say “Flock”. I am thinking about a software that enables me to send island messages and set video conferencing. Just like Slack and Fleep, Flock also has a robust search that shows you messages, files and links.

It also provides a reminder bot, it has the ability to bookmark some messages and pin chats. A small icon below the person's name shows you whether the person is online or not.

Software for keeping the focus

Freedom

Freedom app helps you to stay productive by blocking some websites for you. Since social media, shopping websites, video games and many others distract attention during work time, this software blocks them for you.

You can choose working time and sync blocks across all your devices. There is also a feature that enables you to plan the sessions that recur daily or weekly. Supported on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome, Freedom promises to save an average 2,5 hours per day.

Forest

Forest is a stay-focused software whose idea is to build a forest in which every tree symbolizes one task. Since Forest partners with Trees for the Future, a real-tree planting organization, you can contribute both to your productivity and planting the trees.

When users spend virtual coins they earn in Forest on planting real trees, Forest donates it to their partner and creates planting orders.

Brain.fm

Brain.fm is one more productivity tool for software development teams that provides music as brain stimulation. You can choose music between groups of sounds for work, relaxation or sleep. Each of these three categories has several more options to choose between.

All of them create functional music that elicit strong neutral phase locking and influence cognitive state. This should engage neurons in various kinds of activities and also remove distractions in the sound. You are supposed to see results after 15 minutes of listening to the music.

Productivity tools for software development teams - Conclusion

If you are working with code, you are aware of the importance of productivity. As in everything, productivity in software development comes with time. So, don't be too harsh to yourself in the beginning. With continuous work on your skills and with help of productivity tools for software development teams, you cannot not get better.

Since software development is often a team-based work, don't forget your team skills. Sometimes no matter the quality of code, the output still won't be as good as planned because of lack of understanding.

If you are working with more people on the project, and especially if you are responsible for your team, make sure you understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Finally, do you really think about productivity while working on your projects? If so, what are your productivity tips and tricks? Feel free to comment!

St Patrick’s Day Gifts for Coworkers: 2022 Ideas

Ivana Vnucec — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:25:58 +0000

What to give as St Patrick’s Day gifts for coworkers? Sometimes the hardest people to shop for are the ones who we spend the most time with.

But don’t worry! We are here to help you, and we know exactly what your colleagues would like because we are working with the same type of nerds. The perfectionists and bosses of their discipline, to be precise.

And if someone is a newbie in your office, the list is still a great place to get motivation.

So get your wallet ready and scroll through our top gift ideas, cute and funny St Patricks day gifts to help everyone on your list of good coworkers who deserve a token of appreciation.

The top St Patrick’s Day gifts for coworkers

What makes shopping for a productive colleague hard is that they usually already have a lot of notebooks, calendars, and things to help with their work.

One more thing is that they probably don’t like to collect a lot of clutter in their daily routine and especially in the workplace.

They value intention and structure in their lives. However, a way to go is that they too like to try new things. These items will help your special productivity-nut feel creative, more efficient, and give them those saint Patrick's fresh energy that we all want to have!

And if that person on your list doesn’t quite have their timeline optimized, these cute St Patrick's day gifts will help them get those productivity juices flowing in 2022.

JadeALM

Give them a gift that keeps on giving – JadeALM!

Whether you are a software developer, project manager, product owner, or someone excited to have their requirements organized in the best way possible – JadeALM is the platform for you.

Try to play with your project in JadeALM It’s free!

Think of JadeALM as the ultimate document of your tasks, that puts them in the WBS chart and timeline automatically for you. It is also paperless and doesn’t take up extra space on your desk, get lost, or tell you what to do. And still, it offers a lot more.

Time block desk clock

Another cute St Patrick’s Day Gifts for Coworkers is a desk time block. In other words, to give them colorful and physical timers to make them more productive. The technique that stands after it is called Pomodoro, which in Italian means tomato. Cool fan fact, right?

Time blocking method for productivity is not a new thing, yet it is effective. There are many similar apps and tools that use the same method to boost your efficiency. The way to use them is to set the timer on each task you do. For example, 5-30 minutes blocks of time.

Tip: This is also a great thing for someone who is new to productivity or someone who has a hard time with stopping procrastinating. These cute timers help you to force yourself to finish the task and organize your time better. Moreover, when you look at them, they cheer you up.

Foot Hammock

It is absolutely okay if you think this one is too funny to be a present. The foot hammock is both a funny St Patricks day gift and helpful if you need to sit for many hours. Keeping your legs down on the floor while sitting can also slow down circulation and make your legs tired faster.

This cute hammock helps your legs to rest while you are working. Take a look!

Smart notebook

Okay, I know I said we are done with the notebooks, but this one is different. It is paperless and connected to your Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, One note, Slack, iCloud. It is environmentally friendly with only 32 pages, yet they are reusable. You can wipe clean them with a damp cloth and write all over again.

Sophisticated AI technology enables you to use smart titles, smart search, and even email transcription for naming and searching your notes. It is like a mini whiteboard that scans your handwritten notes to your cloud. With a piece of smart paper like this, you can get creative.

The best part? You can copy handwritten notes from a smart notebook to JadeALM and JadeALM will automatically make a WBS chart for them. 😎

Temperature regulating mug

Warm coffee and cold juice are some of the essentials to work in all periods of the day. That's why it’s a perfect choice for a cute St Patrick's day gift for coworkers.

If your dear coworker has a long day or forgets to drink coffee while it’s hot, this mug is a solution for them. It keeps the coffee warm and pleasant. Their drinks will stay hot for as long as they need and they can set the temperature to their liking.

Sunrise alarm clock

One more idea of a present is an alarm clock. This cute St Patricks day gift makes you leave your phone away and use the alarm on the actual clock. Being away from the phone before sleep and right when you wake up makes you feel healthier and more productive.

You can set an alarm clock to wake you up with a light that mimics a sunrise. Or, in the traditional way, you can set an alarm clock to wake you up with a sound. You can also set the time where you leave work and come home in the dark, like the sunrise clock on your own day circle.

A friendly house plant

Plants make the space look more pretty and more calming. Not only for your home space but also for the office, you could go with some calming green friends. One more benefit of this cute St Patrick's day gift is that it purifies the air by itself.

The only thing a plant needs is a water. If your gift-receiver isn’t someone who would put attention to watering, you can always go with a cactus. The cactus will be alright with 11/4 to 1/2 cup, every week or two. To make it a funny St Patrick's day gift, you can look for a cactus in a funny shape.

Air pods or wireless headphones

Productive people like to multitask. They like to make things go quickly and efficiently. Wireless headphones are something to help out with that.

You can walk your dog without headphone wires tangling with your glasses, mask, clothes, or dog rope. They are also useful during work, saving you from bothering with plugging them in.

Tile

Do you lose your items often? Get yourself, or your colleague a tool to help you with your running items. Tile is like Find my iPhone but not just for phones.

You can locate items like keys, wallets, headphones, and your last location. Tile enables you to sync your Echo or Google Assistant so it can easier find your necessary items.

A year of Headspace

Sometimes the best thing you can give someone is to remind them about self-appreciation.

Headspace helps you to meditate, reach a mindful state of mind, sleep better, and to feel calmer in general. Mediating is related to your mood, productivity, being fresh for work and private life as well. Everything that makes a great cute St Patrick's day gift for your coworker.

An interesting book

Even if you don’t know what kind of books your coworker loves, you can always go with something profession-related. One more way to go is a book about self-development. A little bit of self-improvement never killed anybody.

Moreover, books as cute St Patrick's day gifts can help you to understand some topics better or organize your private and business life better. If your coworkers work as software developers, there is a list of books for developers.

Laptop stand

Show your coworker you think about their neck and head. Avoid bad posture and neck pain with a portable laptop stand that tilts toward you to avoid hunching over the keyboard. A simple, yet funny St Patrick's day gift can really make a change in your coworker's daily routine.

You can also carry it and use it both in the office and at home.

Fruit Infuser Bottle

Let your coworker know that you think about their hydration and well-being. This time, you can give them not just a bottle of water, but also a bottle in which they can add fruits. Why drink just water when you can drink water with the taste of strawberry?

Ready, steady, happy St Patrick’s day to your coworkers!

Shopping for someone else can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be.

The best part about all of these present ideas is that they show how much effort you put into St Patrick’ Day Gifts for Coworkers. Finally, the most special thing about it is the time you invested in researching and choosing it. That is why it is called present, not past.

Finally, one of these funny St Patricks day gifts that you give them would also save some time for them.

So save time in handling your requirements with the gift of JadeALM and use extra time to enjoy this spring. 🍀

Who and how to prioritize product backlog?

Ivana Vnucec — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 15:11:09 +0000

Backlog, backlog on the wall, what is the priority of items all? How to organize your backlog and how to decide what items have priority? Your backlog is real and it contains:

Bug fixes
Developing new features
Infrastructure and feature changes
Changes to existing functionalities
Technical debt and refactoring

Even though this sounds like backlog is just a list of what the team should do, it is not. There are some of the properties in every team that differs from a to-do list. Therefore, a scrum backlog is also:

List of requirements where every requirement adds value to the end-user
Set of organized and prioritized items
Set of estimated entries
A living document that is changing and developing throughout the project development

Why prioritize product backlog?

You should prioritize product backlog because it provides a better understanding of project progress. Your backlog should clearly show which tasks bring the most benefits and which could cause the biggest losses. It also shows strategies for solving them in future sprints.

It might feel intuitive to know what tasks are a priority. But when, for example, a new project occurs, you push tasks below the list. In such cases, it is hard to maintain the preference and priority of the tasks. However, for successfully managing the project, you should prioritize your backlog and make it effective.

Who makes a final decision on prioritizing the product backlog??

There are many team members working on a product backlog – Leap Developer, Scrum Master, Product Owner, and a whole Development team. However, in most cases, a product owner is the person solely responsible for the product backlog prioritization. They describe top-level entries to the team and determine which ones are the priority.

Normally, the product owner will gather input and feedback about the progress. Their job is to be lobbied by various stakeholders. However, it is ultimately his decision on what the team will build.

Product Roadmap vs Product Backlog

Both product backlog and product roadmap are a job that you need to do in upcoming sprints. They both are important documents that are changing with project development.

However, they are not the same. A backlog is a sum of tactical details about the project, while the product roadmap is a strategic document. A product roadmap is a broader plan for project development and it doesn’t contain epic and user stories.
A too detailed product roadmap is difficult to understand, prone to change, and hard to manage. That is the reason why we keep high-level features in the product roadmap and details in the product backlog.

Some more differences between roadmap and backlog:

The product roadmap contains high-level plans, while the product backlog is task-orientated and contains requirements and user stories.
A product roadmap is helpful to stakeholders and the executive team, while a product backlog is a document helpful to the development team.
The product roadmap shows your strategy, while the backlog implements it.

Product backlog and product roadmap in sync

Even though they are not the same, product backlog and product roadmap should be synchronized. Since the product backlog influences the product roadmap, a bigger product backlog can change the product roadmap. Further, if the development process is not anticipated, you might need to change for example due to date, and update the product roadmap within.

A good practice is to use the product roadmap to determine the backlog contents and track backlog changes while reviewing the product roadmap. Regular checking should involve the development team and stakeholders.

Product Backlog vs Sprint Backlog

Both product and sprint backlog are contained within an artifact. Artifacts are an agile component that provides information about the product. It is a higher-level document that includes product backlog, sprint backlog, and product increment.

A product backlog is a list of activities that the team should complete in the project. As you have read earlier in the article, it can include features, issues, bug fixes, and non-technical requirements. On the other hand, the sprint backlog is a specific list of product backlog items that belongs to the current sprint.

Further, the sprint backlog tells you what functionalities you should deliver in that sprint. The items within can be divided into smaller chunks of work, such as tasks. Depending on their skills, team members can tackle these tasks.

When the team finalizes the sprint, they estimate the remaining product backlog to prepare for the next sprint. The work that is completed and meets the definition of done, goes in product increment. The responsibility of the product owner, again, is whether to release it or not.

How to prioritize backlog?

There are many ways to help yourself in making a final decision on prioritizing the product backlog. Based on your preferences, you can choose priority intuitively, starting from short-term use one of many methods and techniques.

Set a bucketing system for organizing items

Find one way of organizing and setting priorities that will be used by your team in the whole project. With having it clear what the organizing rules are, it will be easier for all team members to contribute. You can choose between Refined – To Be Refined – Not Prioritized, Large – Medium – Small, and MoSCoW method of prioritization.

MoSCoW method includes categories:

Must have: tasks that are critical for delivery on the due date. Must have tasks influence other tasks, and another task cannot be completed otherwise. The project’s success depends on must-have tasks.
Should have: Important tasks but not crucial for project delivery.
Could have: tasks that are desirable but not necessary. They can become a priority only if other things are finished.
Won’t have: tasks that are the least important.

Schedule Short Term Tasks First

One of the ways to organize and prioritize product backlog is to schedule short-term tasks first. This approach is called weighted-shortest-job-first (WSJF) principle. The WSJF model prioritizes jobs based on their economical value. In other words, you divide the cost of delay by the time taken to finish these tasks. Tasks that could cause the biggest losses are a priority.

For example, if a specific feature’s economical value is $100 per month, then a cost of delay of three months would be $300.

You can calculate the cost of delay in many other ways too. But what they all have in common is – the amount of money that the organization will lose if something is not delivered in time.
Sometimes the delay of feature delivery causes indirect costs. For example, reputational loss, a decrease of subscribers, or inability to upsell. This loss as well accumulates financial losses and you should prioritize which of them is the most crucial in the project.

Separate low priority items

To have an overview of product hierarchy and high strategic values, JadeALM provides you with an automatically synchronized WBS chart. It helps you to understand what tasks are more important and what is less important in a very quick look. No need to spend minutes looking for some dependency or tasks.

In a bunch of product information, it is easy to misplace important ones and less important ones. That is why it is a good idea to have a separate place for low-priority items. For example, you can keep them in very low positions on the WBS chart.

Or, to have a special list of items that are more like ideas than necessities. For example, a place in the editor with the headline “Great Ideas”, or maybe a “Longer-Term Tasks” list.

Some more catchy criteria for backlog

INVEST CRITERIA

The same criteria that work for user stories also work for making the final decision on prioritizing the product backlog. INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable.

Independent user stories in the backlog should be self-contained. Make sure that there is no inherent dependency on another user story.
Negotiable user stories in backlog stand for backlog that is not a rule, but possible to change. Backlog is part of an iteration, and it can always be changed and rewritten.
Valuable user story in the backlog means that it must deliver value to the end-user.
Estimable user story or requirement is a chunk of work that you can estimate.
Small enough user stories in the backlog should finish in 3 to 4 days of work. You can split bigger “Epic” stories into smaller ones and follow the INVEST agile approach.
Testable user story or its related description must provide the necessary information to make test development possible.

DIVE CRITERIA

Another criteria for managing backlog is DIVE. It stands for Dependencies, Insures against risk, Business value, and Estimated effort.

Dependencies in the product backlog are rare. However, when your backlog includes them, they have a great impact on the rank ordering. Because of them, you will need to order a backlog depending on them.
Insurance against risk is another criteria of how to prioritize the product backlog. In your product progress can be infrastructure risk, technological and resource risk.
Value of backlog items means their business value. Items with higher business value should rank higher.
Effort or story points is a measurement of time needed to complete a chunk of work. These story points can help with gauging whether some story can be finished in the ongoing sprint backlog or not.

DEEP CRITERIA

Key attributes of a good managing the product backlog can be shortened into DEEP (Dynamic, Estimated, Elaborated and Prioritized).

Dynamic product backlog is not a fixed object. It is a living tool that emerges over the project progress. As the development team understands the product better, items on the product backlog are removed or added.
Estimated backlog means that items can be re-estimated during the project progress.
Elaborated items should contain enough details for the team to be able to progress. On the contrary, the items that are not in the plan for next sprints, don’t need to be elaborated in detail.
Prioritizing user stories should bring the most value. Stories that are at the bottom of the product backlog are the ones that bring least value.

To wrap up

Once you set up methods for how to make a final decision on prioritizing your product backlog, solving it would go easier. It will also help to make it easier to overview. Remember that that backlog is what your team is working on – so it should be understandable and manageable.

The portion of the backlog should disappear with each sprint so some second-priority items will become first priority. The more organized it is, the easier it is for everyone to know how to move forward. JadeALM has all changes synchronized, so you don’t have to manually update. In busy projects and tight agendas, this huge save of time can be crucial for in-time delivery.

And if your backlog still causes you confusion:

Over the seven jewelled hills,
beyond the seventh fall,
depends on your criteria,
you'll prioritize one item of them all.