StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>IMO a backlog should <em>not</em> include developer stories. There is no way that any Product Owner can sensibly prioritise these alongside business functionality. And what happens if the Product Owner deems one of them unimportant and so pulls it out the backlog? If the team then insists on keeping the story, you are in a situation where ownership of the backlog becomes unclear.</p> <p>However, I do definitely think that the team need to build architecture early on in the project. One problem on my project was that we focussed too heavily on functionality in the first few sprints.</p> <p>Let's think about "architectural debt" (similar to technical debt) as time that needs to be spent building infrastructure and architecture. Unlike technical debt (which starts at zero and builds up as the team produces functionality without proper refactoring), a team <strong>starts</strong> with architectural debt and must work to reduce it. Time spent reducing architectural debt means that less time is spent producing functionality, i.e. a lower team velocity and reduced sprint output. In this way architectural debt is similar to technical debt. If requirements emerged that didn't fit the current architecture, then the level of architectural debt would increase.</p> <p>Bear in mind, that the team should decide (and be able to justify to the Product Owner) how they are going to spend their time. And so they can split their effort between functionality, technical debt and architectural debt as they see fit.</p> <p>Architecture work should still be driven by functionality though. In other words, the team should build infrastructure to support and enable a particular user story. Not just because they think it will be useful in the future. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_ain't_gonna_need_it" rel="noreferrer">The YAGNI principle</a> applies to that sort of approach.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload