I’d like to suggest a radical strategy for backlog management. The strategy is simple, whenever you review an item and opt not to consider it for active work, destroy it. Yes, you heard me, set fire to the blighter!
This might seem a little extreme at first glance, but I think the logic behind it is pretty straight forward. First, by keeping it, you are implicitly saying that anything new that you will learn as you work is less important than the thing you just said no to. Secondly, by keeping it, you are also implicitly saying that you have no feedback mechanism whereby the item could come back to you without constantly collecting and reviewing it <insert Gollum sounds here>. And don’t get me started with the cost of maintaining all that baggage if you opt to keep it. Believe me, I understand that we love our precious items… I do. But a backlog item just doesn’t have value unless it’s being worked on meaningfully right now.
With the year end looming, this might be a good time to simply grab all that baggage in your backlog and toss it out. Trusting that if any item was really important, it will come back to you quite naturally in good time.
InsideOutAgile 