Product Backlog, No More!
Agile Development is undoubtedly a major step forward for humanity. But even with the Agile methodologies and tools, there is still too much waste in software development.
The Agile Development process starts building the Product Backlog for the application. It is not rare projects achieving hundreds of items in their backlogs. Even these items being just a brief description for the features (not a whole requirement analysis like the waterfall method), it is still considered Upfront Planning and upfront planning doesn't give much room for user inputs. If it does, a lot of replanning effort is required.
User Driven Development process starts defining the Minimum Viable Products for the application. Than, the tasks for each iteration (possibly except the first one) are created only after the metrics of the previous iterations are released. If the iterations are short and the user feedback loop is rapidly and smooth, developers will always have tasks to improve.
Based on the uncertainty within software development, the idea is to reduce waste having the user feedback loop much more dynamic.
"Validated Learning Should Feed the Product Backlog"
- The Enterprise Build-Measure-Learn Network, David Bland
- The Enterprise Build-Measure-Learn Network, David Bland
It is very common Product Owners having a hard time to minimize and prioritize requirements. They usually want everything to be done, and urgently. Not rarely a Product Backlog has several items with the highest priority. Even if they still think that everything can be done, the development process can be facilitated by identifying which feature they want to be the first immediately delivered, that means, just put the highest priorities in an order and select only the top one. The goal is to give a starting point to the development team. From there, the next priorities should be defined from the results of the interviews with the end users.
"Teams should adjust what they are doing based on what team members learn directly from their efforts." - Mary Poppendieck
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