What is a Healthy Backlog

A healthy backlog denotes the level of detail in your product backlog that the development teams and mainly product owners need for the project to be successful. It is vital to establish a sufficiently detailed backlog.

When the scrum team has too little work in their product backlog, there is a risk of the team sitting idle when a story in the sprint backlog is blocked or impeded due to some reason. This wastes both time and potential value that could have been generated in the said time.

The other extreme of this problem is, if the scrum team has excessive backlogs with extensive detail, the business runs the risk of over-investing in the planning phase with a high probability of changing them at a later stage of the execution. In this situation too we waste time which was spent during excessive planning and hence we need to have a healthy backlog to tackle both sides of issues.

Backlogs can vary for different companies, products, and teams, etc. But in principle, a healthy backlog typically includes stories at various levels of refinement for the next 3 to5 sprints. Stories in the next two sprints should meet the team’s definition of ready (DoR) i.e.

1. All the stories in the next two sprint slots are story pointed,

2. The stories have the acceptance criteria agreed upon by the development

team.

3. The stories have enough details for the scrum team to work on them

immediately.

The plan for the upcoming sprint should be to have the product backlog stories which are ready to hit your next refinement meeting where the scrum team will refine them further. These in-refinement stories generally aren’t fully developed/ready but are a clear representation of the product owner’s vision/wish list.

In summary, a scrum team trying to maintain a healthy backlog should have their product backlog with the following details:

● 2 iterations of ready stories (Meets the DoR)

● 2 iterations of in-refinement stories (stories yet to be refined and marked as ready)

The catch here is the scrum team has to make sure they consider their velocity over the last 3–5 sprint, planned capacity for future sprints, and any known risk or other factors that might impact their progress.

Success Criteria: Scrum team can try to achieve a healthy backlog but in today’s changing time some time we need to circumvent and come up with a new plan and thus all the effort put in that direction is wasted. I would recommend scrum teams put the below-mentioned goal for themselves:

● At least 90% issues in the next sprint slot (sprint 2 if you are in sprint 1)

should actually go to your sprint backlog.

● At least 80% issues in the next sprint slot (sprint 3 if you are in sprint 1)

should actually go to your sprint backlog.

● At least 60–80 % issues in the final two sprint slots (sprint 3 & 4 if you are in sprint 1) should actually go to your sprint backlog.

Disclaimer: Just a recommendation; the teams should decide on their own by considering various factors.