How old is your oldest backlog card?

You have a backlog right? How old is your oldest card? The next oldest?

If your oldest card is <6months, chances are you are either a new startup, OR you are really good at pruning your backlog. Chances are though, your oldest card is....well.....is this old.

Ok, ok. Jokes aside.

TL;DR Your backlog should not be a forever growing endless list of wants and desires and bugs and features you might....or might not implement. Be honest with yourself and your customers, if you haven't done it in six months, close it as decided not to do right now.

More discussion? Great.

Long long ago, in a far away universe, I was talking with my best friend and scrum mentor around a campfire, and the discussion of backlogs came up. Hey, don't judge, this IS fun-time for us. :> LOL Ok, the question of "age" came up. How old is your oldest card? Are they 1month old? three months? Six months? A year....more? Then the real hard question, WHY? Why are you keeping around cards that have been around since the dawn of time? Really?! Do you think you'll EVER get back to that bug from three years ago? Really? REALLY?

Back to present...well, almost, in recent times. I was lucky enough to became a scrum master on a team learning directly from my mentor...and the question of age came up again. Long story short, I pruned the backlog....everything older than six months was closed. Not deleted, no. Just closed. I added a comment saying something along the lines of "Not implementing right now." Oh the uproar the next day!

And now you are likely spitting our your coffee screaming at me too, HOW COULD YOU! Well, it was easy actually, bulk commands helped out quite a bit really.

You still mad? Yeah, so was the overseas team.

But let's be honest. We need to be honest with ourselves, our team AND our customers. If you haven't solved that 1year old card yet, you have actually decided not to implement it. Why not be honest with your customers, stop lying to everyone, and close it as not implementing at this time? There is no shame in that. In fact, as a customer I might be upset, BUT at least that feature is no longer in purgatory or forever on life support never to come out of coma AND I know where that functionality stands.

Sure the team put time and energy into grooming it when it was a few days\weeks old during those grooming sessions eons ago. But that time is spent costs. AND you did good by deciding not to do it. How do I know that? Well, I assume you decided to spend your time on ANOTHER card and not this one. So you let it go. Good. You prioritized, made a decision. GREAT... now it's time to move on.

Here's the deal! Backlogs are supposed to be looked at, re-evaluated for relevance and priority during grooming....oops, sorry, refinement. Ideally by the product owner, and also the team. The larger....the longer your backlog becomes... the harder it is to keep on top on it's relevance. And if you are doing your due diligence and grooming those cards, you are spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME on cards which are, in all reality, NOT going to get done. Let's face it (and this is the point that's going to sting .....a lot), MOST of those OLD cards, are NOT going be implemented. Ouch. Stings eh?

So why the heck are you going to spend MORE time on them? Oh... you might respond with...well, we're not going to, we'll just stop grooming after a certain line\date\card. hhmm ok, so you are arbitrarily deciding which cards on the board...are priority and important and some that aren't? What's the difference between that and just closing them? Oh, emotional attachment is what I would say. Really, you feel emotional about those cards. That was the raw reaction I got after closing the old cards as old as the Model T.

There is also duplication. The longer your backlog is, the greater the chance of duplication. Also the chance of people ignoring the search option and just adding a new card ignoring it's already orphaned twin, only to create duplicates. This happens more often than you probably care to admit to yourself.

Please understand, closing a 9 month old card is not the same as deleting it, nor is it the same as hiding it. You can always bring it back from the dead. You can always search, find it and realize...oh yeah, we made a decision on this already but it that hasn't changed. Or...priorities change, you could bring it back cause you now do need it.

"But wait Peter.....we are eventually going to get back to them." Oh really, now? Ok, sure, maybe one or two, but ALL of them? Most of them? Even a few of them? The reality is, you are adding more and more to your backlog for various good and valid reasons, but the biggest of all is to add functionality your customers need now\today\tomorrow (don't say yesterday, you can't time travel to deliver then). The old cards are things your customers needed back then, not now. Another hard pill to swallow, if you needed them now, you would have been grooming that card and it wouldn't be that old now.

One other thing to think about. If you have a long list of cards to work on, and you truly are working on them, isn't that more of a roadmap of features than being agile and delivering features your customers want and need now? Is your roadmap SO important to you that you are going to forsake what your customer is asking from you today? If that is the case, you should be asking yourself if waterfall would be better for you than agile.

So what happened to those cards after I closed them? hhmm After I left, I heard they brought them back, every one. I guess having them, looking at them is like some type of safety blanket? I'm tempted to bet this week's coffees that no progress has been made on any of them!

Now that I've planted a seed to go look at your backlog, it's time to grab a coffee and get coding!