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Are you starting with Scrum? That’s good news!

• You have a Team: check.
• You have a Product Owner: double check.
• You have a Product Backlog:  …. right?

Product Backlog? Yeah, we have a list with things we could work on, and when (if?) we finish it, we’re done. But is that a Product Backlog?

The minimum viable product backlog (yes, I got inspired) is not just “all items we came up with that we could work on”. It is a filled, estimated and prioritized list of work items. There are three key points in this statement.

The backlog is filled

This means it should at least contain enough work items to fill the first sprint and include an extra work item to expand the product backlog. Most projects start out with a backlog with high level items for the entire system (that may be a dozen to a hundred or more).

The backlog is estimated

The team must have enough information to estimate the items on the backlog. The Product Owner should be able to explain the items, the team should be able to give them a relative size (using planning poker, for example).

The backlog is prioritized

The Product Owner should have a clear vision on the entire product (think big), but also on what to build first (act small). Not always easy. The book says “pick the story with the most business value” but that doesn’t make it easier for most Product Owners.

A useful technique in this respect is a story map. The story map works top-down from the high level work items. These high level work items are typically things a system MUST support in some way or another. It’s just the sophisticatedness of the solution that determines the size of a work item. When Product Owner and Team together work out the least sophisticated solution to all high level items, we have what we call the walking skeleton, or minimum viable product.

Building the walking skeleton is a very useful prioritization, because it proves the (functional and technical) feasibility of the product.

Why this post?

Too often teams “rush” into Scrum to find out after a few sprints that the product backlog requires major maintenance. This might cost more capacity than one would like, possibly affecting velocity and the sustainable pace of the team. To prevent it, make sure you have a minimum viable product backlog from the start, and make sure it remains viable throughout all development activities.

Some people like to compress these activities in a few days, other like it to extend it to an entire sprint (to get used to the rhythm). Some people like to call this preparation “sprint zero”, others argue that it might as well be the first sprint. I don’t care how you call it, just make sure you do the activities associated with a controlled start.

Image taken from yoppy’s Flickr stream under Creative Commons license.

“Better is worse than good enough” (or the Dutch equivalent “Beter is slechter dan goed genoeg”) has been my tagline for quite some time. I put it below emails, use it on this blog and anywhere else where it seems applicable. BTW, I don’t deserve the credits, I first heard this quote from professor emeritus Nielen (not sure if he is the authentic source either).

Many people are confused when they read it and ask me what it means. How can better be worse? Better is better, right? And certainly better than good enough, right? Wrong.

The statement reflects pragmatism. Simplicity. Or, as Einstein put it: “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -and a lot of courage- to move in the opposite direction.”

It feels counter intuitive. We always want to make things better. But think of this: a better solution might be, uhm…, better, but it has at least three major disadvantages:

1. It takes more time to make things better – we don’t have this time
2. It costs more money to make things better – we don’t have the money
3. It has a higher probability on errors – which cost time and money to fix

In software development, we tend to “gold plate” solutions and include all kinds of bells and whistles that will “certainly blow away our customer”. Will this customer really be delighted by those bells and whistles if it means that his project is over budget and too late?

The trick is to hit the sweet spot between “too little” and “too much”. The only way to know that spot is to get frequent feedback -early and often- from your customer. This is one of the core principles of agile software development: close collaboration between development and customers. Scrum implements this principle with the Product Owner role, collaborating closely with the team, delivering software in short Sprints, ending with a Sprint Review of working software.

Now you know what I mean with “better is worse than good enough”. Try it for yourself!

Photo taken from wallyg under Creative Commons license.

Last Thursday we had the last planning meeting of this year. In three weeks time, we will deliver the last release of 2009, ready to be put in production on January 1st, 2010 (this 6 week gap is something for another blog).

It feels kind of awkward, to be planning the final set of user stories. Is this really everything? Can we really miss all that other stuff on the product backlog? Everybody is quite confident that we produced good results.

Nonetheless there are some oddities. While things are being tested continuously, any issues uncovered normally entered the product backlog. In this last iteration, if an issue turns out to be more important than stories already planned, we (team + product owner) agreed to reprioritize during the sprint.

This also means that the team is now even more disciplined about how many user stories to develop concurrently, because we don’t want the PO to drop a user story we’ve just started working on.

But… as the number of user stories decreases and the PO is allowed to reprioritize all work that hasn’t started yet, we might as well say that we’re doing Kanban!

As I said in my previous post, “Kanban, Lean and Scrum Are Not Religions…”, it depends on your situation what tool suits you best. For almost a year, we used Scrum. For the end game, Kanban seems like a better tool. Just do what works.