Scrum Artifacts
By: Ed Vogel
Nov 2018
Introduction
This article provides an overview to the three most basic artifacts for scrum. These include the product backlog, sprint backlog and burndown chart.
The Product Backlog
The product backlog contains the future work that is a set of un-developed stories / features yet to be developed. The product owner is responsible for prioritizing the product backlog in order of importance for the largest current return on value or need. A good general rule for the prioritization of the product backlog is having stories prioritized and reviewed by the team for the next 4 - 6 weeks worth of work. This is accomplished through weekly product backlog grooming. This backlog grooming should occur at a minimum of once every two weeks, though I personally prefer to do this in shorter sessions every week. As a rule of thumb, try to shcedule about 1 hour of grooming for each week making up a sprint.
The backlog grooming sessions include the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the Team. Do not underestimate the importance of having the product owner present for these meetings. This is the time that the team is able to determine what will required to complete a story to the DoD (Definition of Done). As they proceed through each of the stories, conversations are had to bring everyone on the same page for development of each story. The goal of this process is to come away with stories having well discussed having : Intuative Names, Descriptions, Acceptance Criteria. Stories should strive to be INVEST. INVEST is an acronym for: Independant, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Valuable. Rather than delve into this aspect here try reading, AgileForAll - INVEST. Quite often stories will be broken down into more manageable pieces which are just smaller stories. Features are broken into stories, and stories can be split into more stories. In short, we strive to make the stories into manageable pieces which can be completed somewhere between 8 and 40 hours.
The Sprint Backlog
The sprint backlog is a set of stories planned for a sprint. This is where the importance of prioritizing the stories really shows itself. The team will select stories in order of importance from the product backlog into the sprint backlog while adding up the story points until the teams velocity is met. Story points and velocity are not explained in depth in this article.
Assuming the product owner has ranked a the stories accordingly, by value and also dependencies. The team starts from the top of the product backlog and down the list. The team will discuss each of the stories and confirms the story points for each. The greatest appeal for the ranking according to value is the project is always implementing the stories which give the most value, bang for the buck.
The Burndown Chart
The Burndown chart is a great visual indicator to the team's progress through the sprint. In its simplist form there are four components:
- X axis shows the working days in the sprint
- Y axis shows the work to be completed
- Ideal progress trend line
- Actual progress trend line
