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Building a backlog

Leading an agile project

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You've set up your project and configured your systems. It's time to prepare the backlog of issues that your team will work from. 

A backlog is simply a list of features, which could be for your product, service, project, etc. These features are not detailed specifications. Rather, they are usually described in form of user stories, which are short summaries of the functionality from a particular user's perspective. This is a common template for a user story: As a <type of user>, I want <goal> so that I <receive benefit>. For example, "As a developer, I want to log time against my tickets in the issue tracker during a sprint, so that I can show my progress."

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Building a backlog in a Scrum project

In Scrum, it is critical to have a prioritized backlog, so the highest priority items are ready to be included in the next sprint.

The Backlog of your Scrum board is designed to help you manage this. You can quickly add, update, and rank issues on the board to build the backlog. When it's time to start work, pushing issues from your backlog into sprints is as simple as dragging and dropping.

Learn more: Using Plan Mode

Building a backlog in a Kanban project

In Kanban, you should also prioritize the backlog so that high priority items can be quickly picked up by your team.

The Backlog column of your Kanban board lets you easily add issues, rank them, and categorize them. For example, you may use swimlanes to group high priority issues for great visibility, then rank the rest of the issues manually.

If managing your backlog in the first column of your Kanban board becomes difficult, you may want to consider using the Kanban backlog.

Learn more: Monitoring work in a Kanban project and Using your Kanban backlog

Already built a backlog?

Next: Plan a new version

Project lifecycle

  NEW PROJECT  → BACKLOG →   NEW VERSION →   WORK →   RELEASE →   REPORTING

Last modified on Sep 12, 2017

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