Prioritizing the Product Backlog for Testers Part 2

There are different ways and techniques that can be used for prioritising the Product Backlog:

1. MoSCoW Prioritisation Scheme – This method simply categorises PBIs into the following buckets: Must have, Should have, Could Have, Won’t have. These categories are decreasing in order, starting with high-value user stories to those that are considered to have very low or no value at all. Categorising PBIs this way will make it easy for the Agile team to prioritise the set of user stories that should be delivered first – which fall under “Must have.”

2. Paired Comparison – This technique entails the Agile team to list all the PBIs, take one item, compare to each of the remaining PBIs, and do the same for all PBIs. Each time two PBIs are being compared, the team decides which of the two is more important. This way, the Product Backlog is more prioritised.

3. 100-Point Method – Developed by Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig, this method prescribes the team to distribute 100 points to each customer during a voting session. Each participant would then allocate the points to PBIs that they think should be developed, putting more points or weight on those perceived to be more important. Once voting is done, points are totalled, and then PBIs are then arranged from those having the most points to the least.

4. Kano Analysis – This method was developed by Nariaki Kano, and it interestingly classifies PBIs according to how the customers would feel about the features.

• Exciters/Delighters – Features that are perceived to be of high value to the customer, because they are new, innovative, or addresses urgent requests.
• Satisfiers – Features that also have value or meet the expectations of the customers.
• Dissatisfiers – Features that may cause the customers to dislike the product, if not present, but would also have little impact on satisfaction level, if developed.
• Indifferent – Features that have no impact on the customer.

All of these techniques need to involve the customer and get better understanding of their needs. For testers, this is useful for helping the other developers to understand the priority of features to be developed. Prioritising also helps testers know what areas they should focus on, which bugs should be expedited, and which features to test first and test more. Attacking high-priority items first ensures that the high-value items are also delivered at the right time, making the product more usable and valuable to the users, which, in turn, give more ROI to the organisation.

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