Golden Rule No. 3 – Prioritise Backlogs

Or more precisely “Regularly review and prioritise the backlog”. It’s vital that the backlog portrays the work in priority order, failure to keep this well groomed and reflecting reality will seriously damage the effectiveness of using Agile and will also be a drain on the teams time as for every step they will question whether the story they are looking at really is a priority. It’s important to include several checks whilst grooming the backlog –

1. Is the order of stories in the backlog reflecting their priority? A key thing to check here is whether new stories have recently been created and placed at the top – they might be high priority but equally they may have just been left there by mistake. Always ensure that newly created stories are prioritised as soon as they are on the backlog and regularly review the priority of the top of the backlog. You can probably review the stories lower down less often but ensure that they too are correctly representing their priority.

2. As stories rise up the backlog always make sure they are broken down as necessary in good time before being considered for inclusion in a team’s iteration. This is essentially Golden Rule No 2 – “Ensure regular look-ahead planning”

3. Whilst doing 1 and 2 above ensure that any dependencies are clearly understood and any dependant stories are placed below those they are dependant on. It makes no sense to have a story that is dependant on another story higher in the backlog than the one it is dependant on so re-prioritise stories as soon as a dependency becomes known.

If you keep the backlog well-groomed then there will be no reason to worry whether the team are doing the most important things and you should benefit from this key aspect of agile.