Irie, Inc.

I am working with a client to choose a backlog management tool to standardize on. The first criteria that I wanted to focus on was how it serves the needs of the product owner for the daunting task of creating the backlog.

Humans are only able to hold so many distinct pieces of information in their head at a time. Past a certain point, the mind naturally starts treating things as bundles, groups of related items, in order to continue working on them. Some people are able to hold these separate items, others are better at transparently grouping things together. But in the quantity of items that are needed for anything but the simplest of projects, every product owner will need to group those user stories together in order to facilitate the creation process.

For example, as I create user stories, I might find or create two that tell the same story, but from a different perspective. Each adds value, and I would want the different perspectives captured and communicated, but ultimately they are the same story. If I were literally using ’story cards’ as in 3×5 cards on a desk, then in that case I would capture that information by stapling the cards together, so they are treated as one.

As the number of story cards increases, I might start making piles of story cards that are closely related, but they are not quite the same. For example, one story card may represent the basic functionality, while another represents a bit of additional functionality that can be added later which one stakeholder or another might be able to leverage. As more stakeholders weigh in, the pile gets more and more cards in it. Once everybody feels like they have defined what they want, I might give that pile a ‘label’ so I understand what is in it, and then I would paper-clip them all together. From that point forward, I will usually treat that pile as a unit, peeking inside only when I need to.

As the number of story cards continues to grow, more and more of these piles are going to exist. These piles will need some way to organize them. I would look them over, find things they have in common, and start making groupings. Once I have a grouping that seems to me to be ‘complete’ I would use a binder clip to hold them all together, with a ’summary’ card on top of them all, so I can treat them all as a single element.

In some cases, I may deliberately create ‘groupings’ and then start creating story cards to go into that grouping. But in many cases, I will be creating groupings after-the-fact. And unfortunately, I may undo and re-do my groupings once or twice before I am satisfied with them. I may move individual cards from group to group, or I may move entire groups to other groups.

While creating the cards, I will periodically re-open my groups one by one to inspect them and see if any additional stories come to mind. If not, I close them up again and move on to the next, until I feel like I have a degree of completeness.

Most likely, the grouping that I will use initially will be functional in nature. Related functionality will be grouped together. But sometimes, it helps to look at things from a different perspective. So I will want to see my stories grouped by role, so I can look at all of the stories told from the perspective of a particular stakeholder. In doing so, I may realize that there are stories that I may have missed. Or, I may take that bundle of story cards to that stakeholder to review.

Later, when assigning business value, I may want to re-group them again, according to the type of value that they provide to the business, such as attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, increasing income from existing customers, reducing expenses, limiting legal risk, and so forth. In this case especially, one card may belong to multiple groups. By reviewing the cards in context with other cards that have a similar goal in mind, it will make it easier to get a perspective on relative business value.

Of course, a story is not complete if I have not defined acceptance criteria. So I will need to go through the stories one by one, starting with the ones that provide the most business value, and write the acceptance criteria.

Finally, the sizing of stories can begin.

A good backlog tool will be at least as flexible as the analog that it seeks to emulate. Creating story cards will be quick and easy. Moving them around and grouping them together should be nearly effortless, from a technical standpoint.

Ideally, it will be even better than the analog. I can create as many groupings as I want, and nest them as deeply as I need to, without running out of ways of holding them together. I can move some aside that I’m not actively working on, sort them according to whatever criteria I want, or find a specific story without having to remember which group I put it in.

The Tools

In looking for a backlog management tool, the first thing that I found was that the majority of tools completely ignore the need for grouping. The concept of ‘epics’ and ‘themes’ are absent from a great many of them. While I did see a tool that really impressed me, for a number of reasons, the absence of that one feature meant that I had to eliminate the tool from consideration.

After reviewing dozens of backlog management tools, I managed to narrow the field to four: Rally, VersionOne, Mingle, and AgileOnDemand. Of course, for completeness, I need to consider using Excel, the ‘recommended’ tool from the literature, and actually using stacks of 3×5 cards. The deciding factor is going to have to be, does the tool let me do what I want, the way that I want to do it?

As we move forward in this analysis process, we will take specific scenarios and see how they compare.