Sprint backlog as a TODO list: Please don't!

It is a big temptation To use your backlog management tool as a to-do list manager. After all, if you want to keep track of the progress of your product development you also want to account for those tasks that are involved in the process right ? Well, the thing is this is not a good practice and in this article I'm going to show you why .

THE REASON WHY USING YOUR TICKET MANAGEMENT TOOL AS A TO-DO LIST MANAGER IT'S A BAD IDEA

Let us assume that as part of a product development, we conduct a Refinement Session with the team. We discover that there are 10 tickets required to build the product.

Five of these tickets are to-do list items. These include tasks such as supporting other teams, attending meetings, responding to customer requests, and so on. We add these items to our Scrum board, along with their corresponding story point estimations, so that we can keep track of them.

The other five items are actual development and QA tickets. These include tasks such as developing API endpoints, preparing the user interface for a screen, and inserting an object into the AI model workflow.

During the Refinement Session, we determine that these tickets are worth X Story Points. Based on our team's Velocity in previous Sprints, we estimate that it will take our team one month to complete all of them.

Let’s now assume that half a month has passed and you want to check the progress of the product development. You check the items and see that half of the tickets are marked as "DONE" Can you assume that half of the product is already done?

The answer is that you really do not know. You would have to check all of the tickets and manually count them to see exactly where you stand in the product development progress. It could be the case that most of the tickets that have been marked as "DONE" are actually to-do items, and your product is only 30% or even 10% developed. It could even be the case that the team has only been working on to-do items, and the actual product increment at that point is zero.

COMMON COUNTER ARGUMENTS

When I tell this to the teams I work with, I hear two typical answers:

1. The first answer is: "This cannot happen because it is the Product Owner's responsibility to set the priorities in the backlog, and consequently it cannot happen that a to-do list item has a higher priority than a product development ticket." This is an incorrect understanding. The Product Owner's mission is not to prioritise between a developer's to-do list and the product features. The Product Owner has to prioritise between the different features of the product: what makes sense to be developed first and what makes sense to be developed later, based on business, technical, and strategic considerations.
2. The second answer, which I hear less often, is: "Well, if we worked on the to-do list items during the first 15 days of the month, then we have the remaining 15 days to work on the product development items. So, there is nothing to worry about. Things will turn out well in the end, right?" This is also an incorrect answer. The fact that there are 15 days left in the month does not guarantee that the product development items will be completed. There are many factors that can affect the progress of a project, and it is important to track the progress of all of the tickets, not just the product development tickets. Even though there is a point in this answer, in my opinion there's a conceptual issue with it. And the issue is that the AGILE philosophy is all about getting customer feedback as soon and as often as possible. So even though leaving the product development tickets until the end may turn out well, it implies assuming some risks that go against the AGILE? logic.?

So if you want to track your TODO tickets, use a dedicated tool for that. There are many options: Trello, Monday.com, Airtable… You will surely find one that fits your needs.

If you still want to to use the same tool that you use for your sprint planning, then you have to figure out a way so that those TODO tickets do no interfere with your ceremonies (after all the ceremonies are intended to coordinate the team’s work and your TODO list are for you alone) and they do not distort the team metrics (i.e velocity or burndown charts). Some AGILE tools makes it easier for you than? others (i.e JIRA is so configurable that it is relatively easy to come up with? a setup that achieves all of the goals but TargetProcess may be a bit more difficult to setup correctly to achieve that) so you have to know your tools and how to use them to make the most out of it.