Activity – defining the Product Backlog

One of the hardest parts of our transition to an incremental delivery approach is breaking down our team mission (the problem we're being asked to solve) into manageable chunks of work that will deliver working software.

Fortunately, there are several techniques for creating a backlog from scratch; these include User Story mapping and impact mapping. Both focus on maximizing the value we deliver to our customer.

We'll go into more detail about both of these techniques later in Chapter 10, Using Product Roadmaps to Guide Software Delivery, and we'll discuss User Stories in detail in Chapter 4, Gathering Agile User Requirements. For now, we'll assume the Product Owner has already created a set of User Stories for us to release, plan, and refine.

Having a physical backlog in the form of a deck of index cards has several benefits:

• It allows you to lay out the backlog easily to see the bigger picture 
• It's tactile; something you can touch, pick up and examine, or easily move
• By shuffling the order, you can create multiple planning scenarios
• You can easily stick the stories on your Scrum Board, and turn them into a key part of your visible workspace
• Throwing the completed User's Stories in a cardboard box at the end of a Sprint and watching that pile of done stories grow iteration after iteration is very rewarding