Thursday, October 11, 2012

Impact of Product Back Log on Agile adoption...

Product Back Log ?

Product backlog is a prioritized features list, containing details of all functionality desired by a product as indicated by customer/product manager. 

In my past few year of experience in agile development, one of the critical & most debated topic in retrospection are,

  1. "No stories that are ready to play ?"
  2. "Team burn rate is high, product back log has exhausted"
  3. "BA vs Developer ration doesn't match"
  4. "Couldn't get time from business users, product owners"

Intent of this post  is not to address above issues, since it depends on the context & varies from project to project. All I want to bring up is how big a disaster a non-steady product log to a project/organization adopting agile process model.

So, what is the impact of non-steady product log ?

  1. In one iteration team "Delivered 20 points & in another just 5", why ?
  2. Average velocity goes for a toss, hmm :(
  3. Business/Management uses the Avg. Velocity to promise more delivery, which is already a misskewed number :(
  4. Developer would be spending on tech-debt, since no user stories. Meaning more cost/burn rate of less churn of business values.
  5. Arriving at project/organization level metrics would be a night mare :(
  6. This also affects the development teams effectiveness & ability to deliver as the fluctuation to high.

What have been your experience ? Your comments are most welcome...
 





1 comment:

Bha said...

We work on same kind of stuff. Ur comments are helpi