Tag: software development

Prioritising a backlog doesn’t need to be rocket science!

The common component in most software development agile practises is the backlog – a list of user stories, often written on cards, that represent a feature or a piece of work that needs to be completed by a member of the development team.

This backlog of work needs to be prioritised – and I have seen different people do this in different ways.

I’ve seen these items prioritised individually in excel by a single individual, where many different factors have been scored and a calculation applied to give a final score where weightings have been applied. This took a lot of time and a lot of toing and froing – all the while the development team were working on lower value items. Made no sense to me.

This list is then ordered largest value to smallest, resulting in one person’s opinion on what his list should be. This did not take into account any development team member’s experience, as well as any other teams that may be impacted by the work.

Any new items would need to be scored in this fashion, debated extensively and then slotted in to the backlog.

As far as I am concerned, this is not the way to prioritise work – especially in an agile environment.

A big part of agile is collaboration, responding to change and having working software at the end of each release. Why not apply these five principles to prioritisation.

Get everyone together

If someone is involved or impacted by the functionality being discussed, get them involved in the prioritisation – within reason obviously. At least have each department represented and ensure that there is one mediator and someone who can make a final decision if there is a disagreement.

Understand the goals

Set out at the start what the strategy is for your product and set out the objectives. Each user story or card needs to constantly compared to these objectives and ranked according to how far it goes to achieve these goals.

Relative priority

Keep things simple. Select a starting point buy placing a card in the middle of a table. Discuss this card and ensure that all involved understands exactly what this card represents and how it helps to achieve your product’s strategy and objectives.

Select the next card, discuss what it is and explore it’s benefits, risks, amount of dev work etc and then place it above the card if it is more important or below this card if it is less important.

Keep doing this with each card until you have a fully prioritised backlog. If its a big backlog, then you may need to split this into a couple of sessions.

Be flexible

Through discussion, you may find that items are no longer required or require more definition or to be defined. You can do this in the meeting itself or separately.

Future proof

Once finished, when new items come up, they can be easily prioritised as all members of the team understands the backlog and how it is made up. You place the new feature in the backlog relative to everything else.

In my experience, this is by far the best way to prioritise work. Having items prioritised relatively compared to other work get’s the business to understand that they cannot have everything all at once and that a decision has to be made as to which is more important than the other. You do not have a spreadsheet that gets ignored with multiple items with the same value.

Items can be redefined as you go and the team as a whole has been included and feel valued. The whole team has a voice. This leads to highly motivated team who have bought into the product and what is trying to be achieved.

A Practical example of Feature Driven Development

Feature Driven Development (FDD) is often theorised about on many web sites with blog posts, articles and essays being published on a regular basis and this blog post will give you a much needed practical example of it in use.

One article that is worth pointing out is DZone’s Introduction to Feature Driven Development. This is part one of a two part article describing a theoretical project and a theoretical team and the first three of five steps to achieving Feature Driven Development. It is extremely well written and gives you some really good insight into what is needed.

In my experience, I find that when you take these theories and methodologies and apply them to real life situations and projects, that they need adapting and shaping to fit with what you are trying to deliver.

An example of this is when I was leading the Product Development across five different web sites and one development team. The way in which I had implemented the Kanban methodology was different for each site due to different stakeholders and different commercial strategies needing to be delivered.

Anyway, back to a practical example of Feature Driven Development.

The example that I am using is the build of Mousebreaker, a casual gaming site that utilised a mixture of Kanban and Feature Driven Development to quickly and effectively deliver a new web site with a new code base in 28 days.

Traditionally, my approach had always been to gather all requirements, build the infrastructure, then the code, and finally the front end for a web site.  This information gathering and the writing of functional and technical specs can take a long time to complete. Then, when the development begins, the whole spec needed to be delivered before the site could launch. By which time 6 months has passed and requirements may well have changed and what is delivered is not necessarily what the business or the market needs.

Feature Driven Development tries to get around this by defining the requirements as features, then the business owners and development teams prioritise these features into a backlog of work and then the developers deliver these features in the order that offers the most business value.

One thing to note is that there is some pre-work that needs to happen before development can start. The general technical approach needs to be agreed; technologies need to be discussed, terminology needs to be agreed and basic development, testing and live environments need to be created.

In addition, certain standards would have been discussed such as coding, SEO and accessibility standards and any automated testing. In addition, any front/back end frame works that will be used as well should also be discussed.

If you look at the Mousebreaker site, you will see that the primary user function is for the user to play flash games. So the first feature that was worked on was that the user needs to be able to play a game on a web page.

At first, the developers approach was to start building a database infrastructure that could be used for the whole site. They were also wanting designs for pages etc. You need to be careful here as that is not what was required by the feature. All the feature required was for the user to be able to play a game. Nothing else.

So to deliver this feature, all that was required was a static html page with some embed code that would allow a user to play a game. The game needed to be in a web facing folder.

Once complete and tested, the feature can then be released.

The next story was that a user needs to be able to play all games on a web page.

This is where the database gets created and the initial html page is turned into a template. Again, the developers only needed to create a database that delivers the feature’s requirement.

In the meantime, while the initial features were being delivered, the designers were working with the development and business teams to deliver the designs for the site. There was a further feature for the site to have a premium look and feel that eventually would need to be delivered which could be applied to the site around the templates that were being delivered.

This felt a little back to front, but you need to remember that we were delivering features in the order of business priority.

As the features kept being delivered, the site quickly started to take shape. Throughout the development, the business representatives were always attending the stand ups and were constantly making decisions on scope of work and what would be required for launch.

We found that the close collaboration between the business and the development team was the most effective way of managing scope and ensuring that what the dev team delivered is what was expected.

I have applied this form of Feature Driven Development many times and I find that it really works. You do need buy in and effort from the business owners, and you do need to make sure that the developers do only focus on what is required to deliver the features rather than architecting a full solution before understanding all the requirements.

This allows more of a front to back development process. Where the features take priority over the implementation. One thing that I would like to point out is that there would be occasions where future considerations are sometimes ignored or put to one side to get functionality out and that this may result in refactoring work further down the line.

The thing to remember is that you will have already delivered the highest business value functionality required at that point and that the business will understand that any refactoring work should also have a value and then a discussion can be had about options and whether this work needs to be done or not. If it does and it takes a longer period of time, then allowances should be made for this.