{"id":930,"date":"2011-08-03T13:47:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T20:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.plm.automation.siemens.com\/t5\/Polarion-Blog\/Polarion-Goes-Scrum-2011-Part-4\/ba-p\/380672"},"modified":"2026-03-26T05:32:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T09:32:28","slug":"polarion-goes-scrum-2011-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/polarion-goes-scrum-2011-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Polarion Goes Scrum &#8211; 2011 (Part 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><EM>By Nick Entin, VP R&amp;D, Polarion Software<\/EM><br \/>\n<H2>Polarion&#8217;s Product Backlog: composition and priorities<\/H2><br \/>\nIn the <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.polarion.com\/archives\/1327\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">third article in this series<\/A>, I shared some of the Polarion R&amp;D team\u2019s not-so-secret secrets for configuring Polarion to support the way we work with Scrum.<\/p>\n<p>In this fourth article I will discuss the various backlogs we have in the Polarion R&amp;D team, and how we populate and prioritize them.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cmain\u201d backlog is the <STRONG>Product Backlog<\/STRONG>. Ideally, the Product Owner would write an Excel or Word document with his items for this backlog, and then simply reshuffle them according priorities. Of course any ticketing system would allow management of such artifacts in a good way, and Polarion is no exception. But as you may surmise, there\u2019s more to it than that, at least for us.<\/p>\n<p>Before getting into the details of Polarion\u2019s Product Backlog, let\u2019s look at how we create and prioritize the User Stories that comprise it.<br \/>\n<H3>Composing Epics and User Stories<\/H3><br \/>\n<DIV id=\"_mcePaste\">We use several ways of composing User Stories:<\/DIV><br \/>\n<DIV id=\"_mcePaste\"><br \/>\n<UL><br \/>\n\t<LI>Through the Polarion Web UI &#8211; \u201cCreate Work Item\u201d or \u201cCreate Document\u201d<\/LI><br \/>\n\t<LI>Using Email (send Email to Polarion Mailet)<\/LI><br \/>\n\t<LI>Or via importing a Word document to Polarion.<\/LI><br \/>\n<\/UL><br \/>\n<\/DIV><br \/>\n<A href=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.1-Fig-7.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1350\" title=\"New User Story type Work Item in the Polarion web UI\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.1-Fig-7-300x257.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of new User Story type Work Item in the Polarion web UI\" width=\"300\" height=\"257\" \/><\/A><\/p>\n<p>You may notice that we\u2019re using customized form layout for User Stories, making the most important attributes visible directly in the top-area of the Work Item.<\/p>\n<p>Newly created WorkItems appear in Tracker and it\u2019s relatively easy for all stakeholders to find them using our Query Builder (e.g. for our configuration a query might be \u201c<STRONG>type:userstory AND backlog:usability<\/STRONG>\u201c), or such queries might be included into a Wiki page using the {workitems} macro:<br \/>\n<DIV><A href=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.1-Fig-8.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1352\" title=\"Backlog user stories displayed in a Polarion wiki page\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.1-Fig-8-300x201.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of backlog user stories displayed in a Polarion wiki page\" width=\"300\" height=\"201\" \/><\/A><\/DIV><br \/>\n<H3>Prioritizing User Stories<\/H3><br \/>\nThis is the point where our process differs from typical Scrum. As mentioned above, we have several relatively independent stakeholders, who are committed to common goal, but somehow pursue their own target (not an unknown situation, is it? ;-)) For example, our Support Lead might want to address integration with third-party software, because several customers are trying to implement it themselves and flooding support with relevant requests. Of course this guy knows that there are other important features or problems, but he doesn\u2019t want to compare if his idea is more important or less.<\/p>\n<p>In our case, each backlog is prioritized separately by the corresponding Backlog Owner. Also, the Backlog owner defines the threshold of his items &#8211; those items must appear in the Product Backlog and, ideally, should be discussed by the team.<\/p>\n<p>We created a Wiki page like the one shown in the figure above, which collects those backlogs and visualizes the top items:<\/p>\n<p><A href=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.2-Fig-9.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1354\" title=\"Polarion R&amp;D teams Top Items wiki page in Polarion ALM\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.2-Fig-9-300x206.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of Polarion R&amp;D teams Top Items wiki page in Polarion ALM\" width=\"300\" height=\"206\" \/><\/A><br \/>\n<H3>Extracting from specific Backlogs to Product Backlog<\/H3><br \/>\nThe next step should be to collect all the required items for the Product Backlog &#8211; it\u2019s relatively easy to create a query which collects all the \u201ctop\u201d items from corresponding backlogs and displays the results in a Wiki page:<\/p>\n<p><DIV style=\"background-color: #F9F9F9;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;padding: 3px;font: 11px\/1.4em Arial, sans-serif;margin: 0.5em 0pt 0.5em 0.8em;width:300px;\"><A href=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.3-Fig-10.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"size-medium wp-image-1356\" title=\"Polarion R&amp;D team's product backlog as a wiki page in Polarion ALM\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.3-Fig-10-300x195.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of Polarion R&amp;D team's product backlog as a wiki page in Polarion ALM\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\" \/><\/A><DIV style=\"text-align:center;\">Polarion R&amp;D team&#8217;s product backlog as a wiki page in Polarion ALM<\/DIV> <\/DIV><\/p>\n<p>The next step will be for the Product Owner to prioritize the list. We\u2019ve defined new custom field \u201cProduct Backlog Priority\u201d (PBP) with type Integer, where PO may sort the items accordingly.<\/p>\n<p>Nice thing in Polarion &#8211; you may click \u201cMore\u201d in the Wiki\u2019s table to open the Work Items table. You may configure special View for the Product Owner. I use personal table settings to expose PBP column, so I can easily reshuffle items.<\/p>\n<p>The PBP attribute also helps to track down if there were some changes in particular backlog, but not yet reflected in the Common one \u2014 a query, which lists all the \u201cimportant\u201d user stories, which don\u2019t have the PBP initialized:<\/p>\n<p><DIV style=\"background-color: #F9F9F9;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;padding: 3px;font: 11px\/1.4em Arial, sans-serif;margin: 0.5em 0pt 0.5em 0.8em;width:300px;\"><A href=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.3-Fig-11.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"size-medium wp-image-1359\" title=\"Items from other backlogs not yet in the Product Backlog\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2011\/04\/4.3-Fig-11-300x71.png\" alt=\"Items from other backlogs not yet in the Product Backlog\" width=\"300\" height=\"71\" \/><\/A><DIV style=\"text-align:center;\">Items from other backlogs not yet in the Product Backlog<\/DIV> <\/DIV><br \/>\n<H2>Additional tips from our development process<\/H2><br \/>\nDuring creation of Work Items, we actively use Polarion\u2019s Auto-assignment feature, which immediately assigns a Senior Developer, who potentially will be leading the implementation. He gets email notification and sees this new item assigned to him. This way we encourage early review of posted user stories, already-filtered input for the planning meetings, etc.<\/p>\n<p>To simplify prioritization, the \u201cweight\u201d or \u201cinitial estimate\u201d of a User Story is important, and automatic assignment helps to get initial review and communication even before the Planning Meeting.<\/p>\n<p>Also we\u2019ve configured Epics to aggregate Remaining Estimates from the child User Stories. This data allows us to calculate remaining efforts for the release and keep track of whether a big feature is implemented fully or just partially.<\/p>\n<p>Note: we pay special attention to any User Story(ies) committed to a Sprint, but not completed properly. It\u2019s very natural to let these go to the next Sprint because \u201cit\u2019s just took a little longer than was planned, therefore it isn\u2019t done yet\u201d. The intuitive expectation is that as soon it\u2019s moved to next Sprint, it will be done in the first day. No! Practice shows that developers quite often leave unfinished User Stories to end of the iteration because it\u2019s easy to complete and they know exactly what to do. This, however, doesn\u2019t match to reality &#8211; they get late with other tasks, and this Use rStory remains unfinished in yet another Sprint.<\/p>\n<p>A very popular question on our Planning Meeting is: \u201cIf this User Story was not addressed during this Sprint, how can we ensure that our new commitment to this User Story will be actually realized?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the <a title=\"How Polarion Uses Sprint Meetings\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.polarion.com\/archives\/1373\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><SPAN style=\"color: #888888;\">next article<\/SPAN><\/A>, I\u2019ll give you a sneak peek inside our Sprint meetings!<\/p>\n<p><HR \/><IMG src=\"http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/img\/team_Nikolay_Entin.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Entin\" hspace=\"4\" align=\"left\" \/><br \/>\n<EM>Editor&#8217;s Note: <\/EM><br \/>\nNick Entin is VP for Research &amp; Development at Polarion Software. He oversees the development of all Polarion requirements management, application lifecycle management, and team collaboration software products. He is a member of the <a title=\"Scrum Alliance website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.scrumalliance.org\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Scrum Alliance<\/A> and a <a title=\"Info on Scrum Alliance website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.scrumalliance.org\/pages\/certified_scrummaster\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Certified ScrumMaster<\/A>. You can read his  profile at <a title=\"Polarion Software Management page\" href=\"http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/company\/people\/index.php\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/company\/people\/index.php<\/A>.<\/p>\n<p><HR \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Nick Entin, VP R&amp;D, Polarion Software<br \/>\n Polarion&#8217;s Product Backlog: composition and priorities<br \/>\nIn the third article in this series, I shared some of the Polarion R&amp;D team\u2019s not-so-secret s&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68980,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68980"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":931,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}