SCRUM Product Backlog/User Stories

[David]

Hi,

Has anyone using EA to record User Stories, if so do you use the Note or Requirement element with a tagged value to hold the story point value?

Also how have you managed to prioritize the Product Backlog (to allow for the shuffle of items as priorities change from month to month), so the SCRUM Team moves the highest priority items to the Sprint Backlog?

TIA

David

[thomaskilian]

Depends. Normally if I have already a few classes I drag them to a WIP (work in progress) diagramm and attach notes. Later I sort it out. Takes quite a lot experience to follow and draw. So normally paper and pencil are the better choice in the beginning.

[David]

Hi Thomas,

I know I really should keep it as simple as possible and use white boards for diagrams and small cards for user stories. The Product Backlog can be held in an Excel workbook (with filtering on priority).

I would like to keep an historial record of the User Stories and also thought the Element List View in EA could help with the Sprint Backlog.

Would this be possilble or should I keep it simple (if it 'ant broke don't fix it).

Cheers

David

[thomaskilian]

Hi David,
keeping history is rather tricky - and from my point of view impossible with EA. You could use versioning to be able to go back in history (any way recommended). But there is no easy way to e.g. track back the history of class evolution. I keep "hard" elements for a while in an "Obsolete" folder so I can track issues and other things connected to them. But after committing several versions I need to delete old stuff - else it's getting to confusing. So especially dependencies and associations "flow" quite often during design/analysis. Even creating a set of diagrams does not help as they are not sticky to these. You might snapshot diagrams and put them in the version control too.

One manual way to track changes I do is to add a History tag (especially to Issue elements). But I need to update them manually now. Needs some discipline :-/

[bmioch]

Hi Thomas,

Is this something Auditing could assist with?

[thomaskilian]

Hi Bill,
to some extent it might help. The problem here is that you normally have complex changes on higher level. If you move dependencies/associations between elements then you would also need the reason (e.g. "I found out that object X is reposible for this and not Y"). The audit would just show that something has moved, not why. I think the audit is more helpful in reconstructing things once you detect that something had been changed in a wrong way. YMMV