Agile Experts on the Backlog

June 18, 2009

Based on an earlier discussion of the vitality of the product backlog (according to Dave West, the author of the original article, it’s important, really important), numerous conversations have popped up on user groups and beyond. Best of all, it seems everyone who has chimed in has a slightly different opinion. In the face of so little consensus, InfoQ decided to back up and go straight to the experts with a set of questions about the backlog. After assembling a “virtual panel” that included such agile heavyweights as Mary Poppendieck, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Patton, David West, Steve Freeman, and Jason Yip, InfoQ threw the following five questions at them:

  1. What is the purpose of a backlog in your opinion?
  2. How would you define a backlog?
  3. When/where should a backlog be considered waste?
  4. When/where should a backlog be considered essential?
  5. Is there a question or questions that I should have asked and I haven’t? If so, please ask and answer.

There’s a still a healthy amount of differing ideas even among this group, but some commonalities do emerge. You can take a look at all the responses here: http://www.infoq.com/articles/backlog-panel

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Does Size Make Standups Fall Apart?

June 4, 2009

I just saw this post up at InfoQ (http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/large-team-standups) which discusses how well Scrum’s daily standup meeting functions when teams grow increasingly large. For the Scrum users cited in the article, there’s no mystery as to how useful they are for large teams: not very. According to them, as team size increases, these meetings drag on, fail to hold team members’ interest, and, consequently, individual reports are delivered out of sequence. Those who have tried to use Scrum-of-Scrums to address this problem have found that it doesn’t improve things much, either, explaining that the level of overhead increases exponentially with the depth of the Scrum-of-Scrums (i.e. the number of layers).

As I read through all of this, I couldn’t help but think, “Well, of course, standups break down when you try to use them with really big teams!” Scrum is designed to succeed under the recommended conditions. That is, all Scrum literature advises that teams should be cross-functional and composed of seven team members, plus or minus two. That’s a range of five to nine—pretty small, really. So it’s a no-brainer that these teams aren’t getting the advertised results. Would you stuff 30 people into a five-passenger sedan and expect a comfortable ride? Of course not! The same principles apply here.

One valuable point of inquiry in the article was the problem of scaling. I work for a small company that has never had to implement a Scrum-of-Scrums hierarchy, so I’m hardly an authority on the subject. But if you are, I’d be curious to hear some of your strategies for making that configuration work.

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