From the course: Agile at Work: Driving Productive Agile Meetings

Strategies to build the iteration backlog

From the course: Agile at Work: Driving Productive Agile Meetings

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Strategies to build the iteration backlog

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- [Instructor] An iteration backlog is formed containing the stories selected from the backlog the team is committing to implement during the iteration. One of the practices I highly recommend to all teams is to use a Kanban board. Here you can see an example iteration Kanban board. As I zoom in, you can see there are columns, columns for iteration backlog, and then we have some waiting columns. This is a holding queue to be able to know when the next significant value adding activity or set of tasks will occur, such as in-process development, in-process QA, in-process acceptance, and so on. And we do that all the way until we get to done. This is how we know that that story and all the work required has been validated and accepted as completed and put into the done column. So our stories, our work will flow from left to right. Now one of the benefits of using this approach is that the key goal of going through iteration planning is to create an iteration backlog. This is the backlog of those specific stories the team is committing to doing in this timebox. So how it works is we'll take a look over here again at our product backlog ,and we've got the story we're going to follow again, the one that is the primary one for our iteration goal. And as I drag this story and put it onto the Kanban board, it begins to form that iteration backlog. Now, as the team continues to go through this planning event, they'll do the same thing. They'll take the next story, they'll discuss it, they'll come up with a plan for how they would implement it. They'll take a look at the tasks required, who would do those tasks, and balance that against the amount of time that they still have remaining. So we might see that this story is the next one, and maybe we've got a technical story down here. And you can see that although we have a prioritized stack of all of our identified stories, both user and technical in my example, that we don't start with the very number one and go to the number two and go to the number three. What we're doing is we're looking at what is the top priority. We're balancing that against the team members that need to do the work, the subject matter experts or other people that might help us in validating or getting on with doing the tasks of the work, and form this iteration backlog by balancing time available and value and risk and dependencies, and all these other types of considerations that agile teams make. And when we're through with our iteration planning event, we would have our iteration backlog represented here in my furthest left column, populated and ready to go. We might see that coming out of this iteration planning event, ultimately, we would have 8, 9, 10 stories. It's going to depend on the size and complexity of the work we're selecting to do for how many stories end up in our iteration backlog. Some might have more stories, some might have less. This is going to depend again, on the work required to get those requirements implemented as well as remember, our calendar, and how many of our team members might be out of the office. Or again, we might have holidays or some form of a whole team event that would decrease the amount of time in one iteration versus another.

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