One of the changes that we made in the DA 5.3 release on September 30th was to update our advice around managing backlogs. We had been using older terminology from when we first developed Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and we had an out-of-date description of what was being advised in the Scrum community (they’ve adopted a more disciplined strategy in recent years). So we’ve acted and updated this aspect of the tool kit.
Recent Refactorings
There are three refactorings that are pertinent to our discussion:
Managing Backlogs
As you can see in Figure 1 there are four fundamental strategies for managing your backlog of work. These strategies are ordered, you know this because there is an arrow beside the list, indicating that the strategies towards the top of the list are generally more effective than the strategies towards the bottom. In order from most effective to least effective, these strategies are: