Developer Role in Prioritization
The Product Owner is normally in charge of backlog prioritization or managing the backlog items. However, the developer role can help in the process. The value facet is solely the responsibility of the Product Owner. It involves interfacing with stakeholders, which is something that developers rarely or never do. The other measures do benefit from developers, though. Development time relies completely on developers. Being the role who handles the creation of new code, the developer has the experience to make estimates. Given a description and specification, a team of developers usually knows how long any given task should take.
Beyond development time, developers also have the expertise to comment on other measures of priority. With risks, developers have an intuition about issues that may occur or possible setbacks. Among a team of developers, at least one is likely to anticipate an issue, and discuss it with the team. Similarly, developers have a better understanding of dependency. They know what code can be modular, and what tasks benefit most from early development. By writing core code first, later tasks require less work to be completed.
Tools for Prioritization
While prioritizing the product backlog, a collection of prioritization tools may be used. The MoSCoW method is one of the most commonly used prioritization tools. MoSCoW is an acronym for “must have, should have, could have, won’t have.” These are 4 categories to sort tasks into. Some tasks are absolutely required, and so the customer must have them. Other tasks would be very nice to have, but not explicitly necessary, so the stakeholders should have them. Tasks that would add to the value of a product, but are a lower priority than must have or should have tasks fall into the could have area. Lastly, any tasks that will not make it into the next release are won’t have. By placing all tasks into one of these groups, the tasks are sorted into a general order of importance.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: