Ah yes the forgotten land of uncompleted tasks. Slated to be a hotfix when it becomes a problem.
Backlogs are great. Sometimes while working on prioritized tasks the depriorized backlog tasks are made irrelevant and thus you never have to do them and you don’t waste effort. Call it strategic deprioritization or perhaps even tactical laziness.
Everywhere I’ve ever been,
If it’s lower than “High” or “2”, it’s as good as “backlog” :)
(There can never be a priority “1” and seldom “Highest”, never “Blocker”, otherwise the CEO gets a text or something.)
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Lol, I love that week. Feels so productive working on low priority shit that’s been around forever
Refactoring that parser you did for the internal DSL in 2011.
Ummm yeah it will be in “Phase 2” of the project.
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Yet the solution is so simple. Let the them spend 20 – 35 % of their paid time on backlog. Let them refactor the architecture. Let them improve the code base. You know, that thing the Lean book talks about, the part that everyone overlooks, the part so critical yet so often overlooked that others wrote books that ride that one aspect home.
But why do that when instead you can just pretend those issues don’t exist (or simply fail to understand them) and secure a bonus/promotion/personal favour by cutting “unnessecary” labour costs then celebrate by burbling on about how capitalism “maximises efficiency”.
My longest lived backlog task is 3 years old
Those are rookie numbers!
Somehow their company is only 2 years old 🤔
I completed a ticket made in 2011 today!
“I archived them all Padme. They’re gone…every single one of them. And not just the minor tickets.”
But the stories and epics too
That’s why scrum teams need aggressive POs and scrum masters.
No matter how aggressive PO & SM are they don’t get to decide priority.
Yep. Gotta clean out that backlog by deleting the stuff that will never get done.
ugh Jira. At my first job in 2006 I was the Jira administrator. Every project wanted their own custom fields. We had a Jira project for “infra” problems it had 3 fields yall Title/Description/priority and it worked so well. Moved to a company with a simple ticket system with not much more but the concept of “tags” it was heavily
IMO it’s good to have a “shadow backlog” for stuff like this. Keep the actual backlog for prioritised product work, “ideas” and tech debt can be kept in GitHub Issues or even just a wiki page somewhere.
I have two levels of backlog. The first level is my curated list of tickets that are highly worth doing in the near future and is limited in size. It’s currently larger than I’d like at 30-something (for a team of a little under 10), but I’m trying to get the team to focus on it more after historically neglecting it.
The second level is literally just everything else. Hundreds upon hundreds of tickets, ranging from restructuring unit tests (which will frankly never happen unless the structure of the tests somehow became a major barrier) to cool features that just aren’t important enough yet (or would take too long). Plus all the super low risk bugs, often in edge cases that nobody really cares about yet or aren’t worth the time to fix yet. And then there’s all the automation style tickets about improving the handling of something (commonly edge cases of things already automated for the happy path), but often that something just isn’t common enough to be worth it.
Tickets in the second level sometimes do get done. Usually because some issue becomes more common, enough people ask for it, or we simply finally have time for a new feature (can only do so many of those at a time). A common theme I have is I’ll encounter a problem, file a ticket, then eventually encounter the problem enough times that I go, “fuck it, I’ll do it myself”.
This is the way 🤝
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Because then when someone else suggests the same thing you can say that its in the backlog 😉
