SRL Liquid Development is employing Agile development strategies in order to take our work to the next level. One such strategy is the implementation of work backlogs into our framework.
Sprint Backlog
The sprint backlog keeps track of the tasks that we want to achieve in the current 2-4 week work sprint. Liquid Development’s sprint backlog is organized in a Google Sheets document to enable live collaboration and visibility for everyone on the team. Each task has an owner, an assigned number of story points (see Agile/Scrum article for more on this), % progress, a start date, and an end date.
As the sprint backlog is updated, the Gantt chart to the right of the tasks automatically populates. If a task is 0% complete, it will show up in the Gantt chart as a gray bar that spans from the start date to the end date. As the % progress is updated, the bar will fill up with gold representing how far along the task is compared to the current date. If the gold bar extends past the current date, you are ahead of schedule. Otherwise, well…
Team members can update the team on the status of their task by commenting the % progress cell. Moving the cursor over this cell will bring up a bubble where team members can reply in a thread:
Product Backlog
The product backlog is a laundry list of everything that needs to get done to complete the product. The use of having a product backlog is to maintain awareness of all the to-dos while focusing on the sprint to-dos. Tunnel vision is a risk to delivering products on time.
Additionally, the product backlog is your potpourri of tasks to choose from when designing your next sprint.
The product backlog needs not have any specific format. However, it should be the single authoritative source for things that the team works on, and it should be visible to all members of the team.
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