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How many back log list?

 
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If devs is dealing with several projects with several tasks. Is it ok to have one backlog list than to have a separate back log list for every project? If they are in one back log list (ideally), how are they(tasks) ranked? I believe
there will be several product owners who wants their task to get prioritized first.
 
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Sounds familiar and painful. My last project was funded by a half dozen or more business groups. For each release each group got a number of story points proportional to their contribution. We pulled the top stories from each of their pools and re-prioritized in the release plan.

Priorities are significant business decisions so business ought to make them. AD has no business setting business direction. If your business folks are reluctant, schedule a Steel Cage Death Match. Lock them in a room until they work it out. We never pulled that off. We made a best guess at merging the priorities and negotiated a bit from there.

Another alternative is to split the team proportional to the contribution. We did a limited version of that sometimes, dedicating a couple people to one business group but leaving the rest in a pool.
 
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Originally posted by arnel nicolas:
If devs is dealing with several projects with several tasks. Is it ok to have one backlog list than to have a separate back log list for every project? If they are in one back log list (ideally), how are they(tasks) ranked? I believe
there will be several product owners who wants their task to get prioritized first.



The point is that somehow the tasks need to be prioritized, so that the team knows which ones to do first. There are several ways to do that:

- split up the team, so that you have one team per project
- have every iteration/sprint deal with exactly one project
- let the product owners figure it out for themselves
- Petition the King: http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/PetitionTheKing.htm
 
arnel nicolas
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- split up the team, so that you have one team per project
- in this context we are not considered as a team, we will be treated as group of individuals doing diffrent project. It becomes project focus not customer focus.
- have every iteration/sprint deal with exactly one project
- again, its not ideal if i have several projects with different product owners. Product owners is only concern that things should be delivered as promised to the customer. No product owner will give in their way for the others.
- let the product owners figure it out for themselves
- i might go with this one, putting them in a Steel Cage Death Match
Petition King
- i smell politics for this one. But nice giving it a try
[ June 04, 2007: Message edited by: arnel nicolas ]
 
Ilja Preuss
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Originally posted by arnel nicolas:
- in this context we are not considered as a team, we will be treated as group of individuals doing diffrent project. It becomes project focus not customer focus.



So, if you are not a team, but every individual has individual responsibility for a separate project, I would probably use one backlog per individual.

A backlog, in my strong opinion, should be a task list for *one* team, where all members take joint responsibility for the whole backlog. A backlog can't work when people only feel responsible for parts of it.
 
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Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
A backlog, in my strong opinion, should be a task list for *one* team, where all members take joint responsibility for the whole backlog. A backlog can't work when people only feel responsible for parts of it.


In Scrum terms, where you have a product backlog and a sprint backlog, my strong opinion is that there should be one product backlog for one project and one sprint backlog per one team within that project.
 
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Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:

In Scrum terms, where you have a product backlog and a sprint backlog, my strong opinion is that there should be one product backlog for one project and one sprint backlog per one team within that project.



hmm..got it. But whose going to maintain the product backlog? I believe this should be the product owner. And the sprint back log which I believe is the collection of tasks from the product backlog where developers can pick from.
 
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Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:

In Scrum terms, where you have a product backlog and a sprint backlog, my strong opinion is that there should be one product backlog for one project and one sprint backlog per one team within that project.



Ah, yes - I wasn't thinking about a multiple-team-project. I understood Arnel to say that every one of his teams worked on a different project.
 
Lasse Koskela
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Originally posted by arnel nicolas:
But whose going to maintain the product backlog? I believe this should be the product owner.


Yes, the product owner should be responsible for keeping the product backlog in shape. However, the developers should help the PO in doing that, for example, by helping the PO split too big backlog items when they're getting closer to the top of the backlog (i.e. when they're high enough in priority to potentially make it into the next sprint).

Originally posted by arnel nicolas:
And the sprint back log which I believe is the collection of tasks from the product backlog where developers can pick from.


Yes, the sprint backlog is something the team creates by selecting (in collaboration with the product owner) a sufficient subset of product backlog items from the top of the product backlog, breaking them down to technical tasks. The sprint backlog is created by and for the team itself and they maintain their sprint backlog however they decide.
 
arnel nicolas
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In connection to this thread, how necessary for developers to rank the list of team backlogs? Or why is it beneficial for the developers to have the backlog list ranked (1,2,3,4....and so on)?
 
Lasse Koskela
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Originally posted by arnel nicolas:
In connection to this thread, how necessary for developers to rank the list of team backlogs? Or why is it beneficial for the developers to have the backlog list ranked (1,2,3,4....and so on)?


Well, the product backlog should be prioritized (I assume you mean "prioritizing" when you say "ranking") because the list of prioritized product backlog items is used to steer the project.

The team's own sprint backlog, however, doesn't necessarily need to be prioritized. Some teams find it useful to work on items in priority order within a sprint and some teams prefer to "optimize" their work within a sprint based on implementation aspects instead.
 
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