How to plan your backlog
- When choosing issues for an upcoming sprint, you can use "6 ideal work hours per day" as a reference point. An ideal work hour is an hour spent on an issue with a complete focus — no interruptions. It makes 60 ideal work hours per sprint (30 hours per week). During these "ideal work hours" you're in complete focus/concentration, i.e. "in the zone". The rest of your time, you’ll spend on coordination, "work about work", small-ish issues, meetings, and lots of other stuff.
- Search for issues with the label
urgency:X(where X is a number from 8 to 10) assigned to you (for developers, this would usually be critical bugs). You should include them into your next sprint - or do them right now if you have an empty backlog. - After that, choose all unfinished "important"(1) issues from the previous sprint that you've not managed to finish. They should be carried over to the next sprint.
- Next pick "important"(1) issues selected by ProductOwner as goals for next sprint.
- Finally, choose any other issues that will fill up your backlog so you have enough to do for the following sprint. Remember to pick these issues on what will get us most effectively/effeciently towards our short/mid/long-term goals and our vision.
- Don’t forget to include all critical issues and other urgent priority issues (if any) to the upcoming sprint.
When you do the Sprint Planning, ahead of the Sprint Planning Meeting, then make sure to add next sprint label for all issues you are going to add to your backlog: it will help us to:
- filter out all your planned issues for easier review
- automatically move issues to your backlog (by using a script)
(1) "important" issues are those that add value to our platform; either for our end users or our staff, ProductOwner defines them. We usually mark them by importance: high label.