backlog management

Adding Blockers to Your Backlog? Always Include a Specific Next Step

A pet peeve of mine is when progress on a story is blocked with a reason like: “Need code sample to add live chat feature.” Or: “Don’t have VPN access.” What needs to happen next? Does someone know they need to help unblock this? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be wondering […]

Your Backlog Isn’t a To-Do List – It’s Self-fulfilling Prophecy of Success or Failure

Your backlog is an imperfect, always changing, self-fulfilling prophecy for how your software will be built. Not only that, but at a software consultancy like Atomic, it’s also a prophecy for how the engagement will end and deliver on your brand promise. All this to say: Tending to the backlog is one of the most […]

How to Estimate an Agile/Scrum Story Backlog with Points

When you’re trying to get started on your first agile/scrum project, it’s easy to find arguments about why it’s a good approach. But it’s a lot harder to find clear, step-by-step explanations of the tools and processes you need to succeed. I’m trying to fill that gap by answering the question: How do you estimate […]

Increasing Pivotal Tracker Usability with Shorter IDs

We’re using Pivotal Tracker to manage the backlog on my current project. I initially really appreciated the simplicity of the way Tracker presents stories just by their human-readable name. But as the project progressed, there came a point where there were so many stories that it started to become difficult to find stories quickly. One […]

Eliminate Your Team’s Task Backlog

Your team won’t have a traditional task backlog if you stage it out through scheduled iterations. Staging your team’s task backlog into scheduled iterations is an important part of managing your project to intermediate milestones. Atomic’s teams commonly decompose a project into a backlog of tasks that can accomplished in a day or less. Backlogs […]