I’ve been following retroflection for a while now and I promised myself time and again that I would take some time out to write up an answer. But first of all, let me say thanks to Yves for doing this. I may be a rather quiet follower most of the time, but I have enjoyed many of the retroflections so far and hope that by the end someone is clever enough to put all of them, with comments and reactions, in a single something (I smell a possible book release…)
To the point though. Today’s retroflection: “What made you ashamed of yourself today?”
I’m mostly ashamed of how I let the state of our backlog degrade. We’re mid sprint (2 week sprints, this is the start of week 2) and we have an upcoming backlog grooming/planning session on Wednesday. Today is generally the day where I take time to sit down with our product owner and start pushing him on unknowns in the backlog, getting the priorities right, questioning requirements and in general make sure that the engineers have something they can actually work from by Wednesday. Lately however I’ve largely neglected the backlog (not looking for an excuse) and it’s now grown into an unorganized cancer of stories that have little relevance, even less description and it just looks downright ugly.
So I’ll use today’s retroflection as a reminder to myself that backlog maintenance is a daily task for a scrum master and that I shouldn’t let the backlog get to this point again.
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