Product Backlog Episodes

#106. You and the Microsoft Business Apps product owner are on Teams going through the product backlog. You two are working on it together because that’s how it has always been done. And yet, when you look back at the last few sprints, you realize that is not getting the desired results. It’s not your fault; it’s a systemic problem. The problem is that it is incredibly common for only one stakeholder -- the product owner -- to be involved in backlog refinement, but the ideal would be if all the...

#94. I dive deeper into getting into the right mindset to build applications. In the last episode, we looked at ten potential candidates for the product owner role in our scrum teams building Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications. In this episode, we're going to continue the product owner topic by helping the product owner set a product goal. This episode covers: The 2020 edition of the Scrum Guide's reference to Product Goals. Where Product Goals sit in the overall goal hierarchy. Br...

#67. In this Q&A episode, Stephen Price , Digital Solution Architect at ITK Consulting in Canada, asks, "How should we manage scope creep within a sprint in an agile project?" The scope of our product is defined by the product backlog, and the scope of our project is a subset of the product backlog. Both are managed by the product owner: the single person responsible and accountable for the product backlog. In my Dynamics 365 and Power Apps projects, the product owner also manages the project sc...

#65. Neil discusses the five most important changes in Scrum Guide 2020 for Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 teams: It's less strict and less about software One team (except when there're multiple teams) Commitments clarified - the Product Goal No more roles Increments Customery Academy's course, Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps, will be updated in time for the new Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master certification assessment on 9 January. You can get $100 off if you join before 3...

#61. Mark Llewellyn, Director of Technology at Osmosys Software Solutions in London asks, "How can you be sure you've captured all the requirements?" Traditional approaches, like Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, pretend that we can capture all the requirements upfront at the start of a project before we've started development. Upfront requirements analysis doesn't work. You can't capture requirements by writing them down, and you shouldn't try to uncover requirements before your users know somet...

#11. Estimating product backlog items using planning poker is the topic for this episode. The benefits of planning poker: gain a shared understanding of the work, bring diverse perspectives to the estimation process and estimate the work as we learn about the Dynamics 365 system. Who plays planning poker: the role of Scrum team developers, the product owner and proxy product owners in estimation. When to play planning poker during each sprint: sprint planning and storytime. What to play plann...

#10. Neil compares the to-do list on his 100-year old house to the product backlog and goes on to describe: Using epics to capture your project scope Getting your product backlog started Estimating backlog items using story points and not t-shirt sizes or ideal days User stories, spikes, chores and bugs The product backlog in sprint planning and sprint reviews Refining the product backlog in storytime workshops Managing the backlog in Atlassian JIRA or Visual Studio Team Services. Suppor...