Build Your Backlog with Rally.
Your backlog, or product backlog as it's sometimes called,
is a list of prioritized, unscheduled work for your team to tackle.
Wether you're using Scrum, Kanban or another software delivery methodology,
use the Backlog page as a landing zone
for organizing future work and problem-solving ideas.
To see your team's Backlog page in Rally,
check to make sure your project scoping is set to your team,
then select Plan > Backlog
You can add user stories, defects, and collections of defects (called defect suites)
to the Backlog
Anyone on the team can add these items,
but the Product Owner is responsible for prioritizing them.
It's OK to add placeholder items to the backlog now, and then return later
to add more detail or discuss them as a team in what's sometimes called
a backlog refinement meeting.
To add a new item to the backlog, select Add New
and choose a Work Item Type.
The project will default to what you've selected in your project scooping.
Next, type a descriptive but brief name that will help you remember this future work,
and any other information you want to supply at this time.
Select
Create with Details to add the item and continue on to provide
Additional information using the Detail editor,
or Create to add it now.
New backlog items automatically get the lowest rank
Since it's unlikely they'll be immediately scheduled.
Sort by rank and look for them at the bottom of the list on the last page of your backlog.
Apply filters to your backlog list
by selecting Show Filters and adding conditions.
Filters will persist until you remove them,
so to see all the items in your backlog, make sure you've done that.
In between your refining and planning meetings,
team members ay have details or comments to add to an item.
If you add the discussion column to the page it's easy to add these updates.
Select Show Fields to add or remove column in the list.
As with other List Views in Rally,
Toolbar options are available for editing and managing your list items.
And you can always save any of your customized views.
If you're a product owner or product manager responsible for prioritizing the backlog,
sort the backlog list by rank
to use the drag and drop page controls next to each row
to reorder items relative to each other.
If you've sorter by rank you can also use a toolbar action to move an item up or down or to a specific position.
This is especially useful
when you want to rerank backlog items across pages.
The product owner constantly works in the backlog,
clarifying value descriptions and reprioritizing items as more information is learned,
or as events impact choices about which new works should be pulled first.
In addition to this,
the entire team (including the product owner)
should hold a regular backlog refinement meeting
to dicuss the work that's prioritized higher in the backlog,
or to refine other work on the backlog so that it can be prioritized.
Select the ID of a backlog item from the list to activate the detail editor view for that item.
From here you can add discussion items, attachments, and notes,
or sharpen the description and acceptance criteria until it's time to schedule the work into an iteration or release.
If the item you're refining is a user story,
then dependencies are important to consider during backlog refinement.
Select the Dependencies link to identify these associations.
If the user story depends on other work that must be finished first, you can note its predecessors.
If other stories depend on your story's completion,
note those successors here.
If the item you're refining is a defect, identify the impact,
and add any information needed to help reproduce it.
If the item you are refining is a defect suite,
Select the Defects link to add the defects you want to group
to be released together at a future time.
For now, let's dig little deeper into backlog refinement for user stories.
When you're initially adding user stories to the backlog,
the most import information to provide is the name and a simple description.
As you refine your story further,
there are four basic elements to include:
1. A statement that defines the value the story will deliver to the stakeholder
2. A list of acceptance criteria that define the requirements the story must meet
3. A standard "definition of done", or a set of quality agreements
that the team requires for all stories to be shippable.
4. And lastly, a plan estimate which represents the story's relative size or effort
needed for delivery
(as compared with other stories that the team has delivered in the past.)
You can add this information at any time, but more likely,
you'll update it with your team members as you continue to refine your backlog items.
As you add more and more detail to user stories,
they may become too large or broad.
When this happens, you can break a large story down into several smaller ones.
Click the Action Menu icon at the top of the page and choose New or Copy
to create the smaller stories you need.
Now you can work together with the rest of the team to define these stories,
write acceptance criteria, and size them.
Adding a defect to the backlog is similar.
In this case just use the defect type instead of user story.
Your administrator may have added some additional required fields for managing defects.
If so, you'll be presented with the Create With Details option,
and the Create option will be greyed out.
Continue to enter the defect details,
update required information,
then select create when you are done.
It's that easy.
Product owners can decide which is more important to implement next-
a specific defect fix,
or some new capability that is delivered via a story.
The delivery team members-the ones who actually do the work-
are the only members of the team who participate in sizing the work.
As you and your team members discuss each item in the backlog,
you can use a method such as Planning Poker,
the Estimation Board
(which you can find in the app catalog),
or any other practice your team prefers
to compare and size items.
Remember, don't size items in hours-
hours are for estimating tasks.
You'll need a more abstract measurement for your first attempts at sizing.
Exact estimates aren't required.
Therefore, size your backlog items in points
based on the relative complexity, effort, and risk for delivery
as compared to other stories that your team has delivered in the past.
The Fibonacci series is a good example of relative number values you can use.
In this number series,
the smaller numbers are closer together,
but as you get to larger numbers, the values are spaced farther apart,
making them less precise.
Similarly,
in large work efforts, it's harder to know exactly what work will be involved
(or how long it will take to complete)
until the complexity and details of that work
can be better understood.
The real value of sizing if first, getting a ballpark idea of the effort needed,
and second, listening to the conversation among
team members as they discuss the number of points to assign to the backlog item.
It's good for every team member to declare their size estimate at the same time,
then you can discuss discrepancies and reasons why you chose the size you did.
A discussion is an effective and valuable way
to bring forth aspects of the work that may have not been obvious to everyone at first.
When the team come to agreement about the point size for each item,
enter it as the plan estimate.
You can schedule a Work Item by completing the Iteration or Release fields.
However, we recommend scheduling work in Team Planning,
and using the Team Planning page in Rally.
Once you schedule a backlog item into a release or iteration,
it's removed from the backlog page.
Instead, you'll find it in the Release or Iteration Planning or Statues pages as appropriate,
or in any custom views you've created.
Continually refine your backlog in this way,
so that the highest priority work item are always
ready for consideration when your team is planning your next release or iteration.
Congratualations
You now know how to manage your backlog with Rally.
To learn more about Rally and agile practices, check out our blog and community.
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