Product Backlog series - DEEP user stories!

Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything that is known to be needed in a product, it is your to do list! and just like a to do list a Product backlog is a living artefact. It continuously evolves as the product and the ecosystem evolves.

Roman Pichler, author of "Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love" uses the acronym DEEP to summarize key attributes of a good product backlog. DEEP is a descriptive acronym for that stands for: Detailed appropriately, Emergent, Estimated, and Prioritized.

Taking each one inturn:

Detailed Appropriately

User stories are detailed based on their priority, those that are to be worked on soon (up-coming sprint) need to be sufficiently detailed by the Product Owner and understood by the dev team. LIkewise user stories that are lower in order of priority and are not going to be developed for awhile would be described with less detail, and be refined and decomposed appropriatly over time.

Estimated

Items further down the backlog (lower priority items) are not as well understood (yet) and the estimates associated with them will be less precise than estimates given for items at the top of the backlog. Lower priority items may be sized using T-shirt sizes whilst higher priority and refined items are more likely to be sized using story-points.

Emergent

A product backlog is a living document, It will change over time as Product owner’s learn more, user stories on the product backlog will be added, removed, and/or reprioritized.

Prioritized

The product backlog should be sorted with the most valuable items at the top and the least valuable at the bottom. By always working in priority order, the team is able to maximize the value of the product or system being developed, and maximise Return on Investment (RoI).

Summary

DEEP is a useful concept to apply during the refinement process, it involvesadding detail, estimates, and order to backlog items in order to keep the Product Backlog maintained.