Collecting Content for the Product Backlog
Analyzing results from workshops, interviews, and questionnaires will help the team come up with personas who represent user groups for the product. Designing the product around personas helps ensure that the developed product is valuable by addressing the problems and preferences raised by users.
Breaking Down the Product Backlog
One could think of the product backlog as a large repository of work that can be divided into smaller and smaller parts. There’s the overarching statement of what the product is, broken down into what its objectives are, and then further split into what functionalities it has.
The granularity of a feature will vary from one organization to the other. Some organizations use themes or value streams to group features together. Some organizations come up with epics that cover different focus areas, and then map user stories that complete these epics. The Scrum team and the stakeholders need to work together on deciding how to categorize user stories into epics and epics into themes.
User Stories
User stories note the agreements between the stakeholders and the Scrum team and detail what actions need to take place within the product. A popular template used for writing user stories are:
As a (type of user), I want to (action here) so that (reason or intended output here).
This statement encapsulates what the Scrum team needs to cover when developing the product: who the user is, what they want to do, and why they want to do it, as well as the value it will give to them.
INVEST Criteria
The INVEST criteria guides Scrum teams into coming up with good user stories, and it stands for the following:
Independent – Story is not redundant and provides enough detail as it is.
Negotiable – Story can be discussed and is eventually negotiated.
Valuable – Story is important to the customer.
Estimable – Story has an approximate range along which it can be estimated.
Small – Story fits within an iteration.
Testable – Story is clear enough to be tested.
Following the INVEST criteria helps the team practice exchanging feedback, estimating effort, and implementing features with sufficient understanding.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: