The Scrum Artifacts are documents that represent work or value to provide transparency and opportunities for inspection and adaptation. Today we will pay attention to the Product Backlog and the next day we will finish our Scrum’s introduction series with the Sprint Backlog.
The Product Backlog is an ordered item list, in which each item can be a task, requirement, etc, that has a description, order and estimation. The order of the elements depends exclusively on the Product Owner’s criterion, although he/she may consider the an item’s value, profitability, risk, priority or necessity. The higher the item is in the Product Backlog, the more details in description and estimation it should have. This “fine-grained” items have more probability to be chosen in for the Sprint Backlog. The items that can be done in the next Sprint are called “ready” or “actionable” for selection in a Sprint Planning Meeting.
The Product Backlog is always evolving, the process in which the Product Owner changes the Product Backlog, adding detail, estimates and order to the items, is known as Product Backlog grooming. The Development Team collaborates with the Product Owner in this process and estimates how much time will an item last. It is recommended not to take more than 10% of the Development Team’s capacity.
To improve your knowledge about the Product Owner and the Product Backlog I recommend you to watch Henrik Kniberg’s video that we introduced in this post. I hope you enjoyed this first post of the year, please help me sharing!
Source: Scrum Guide and my summaries about it.