Grooming the Backlog

Hello!

I've got my epics, I know what I want to do, I know by what process I'm going to do it, but alas, I need to figure what I'm going to prioritise in my backlog and establish achievable tasks.

To do this, I've created a backlog with multiple epics, broken down into stories using the life wheel distinctions. To create the backlog I've broken down my epics in a Google Sheet, this will make it accessible and easy to edit. Whilst Google Sheets does not have a great deal of functionality it makes an excellent starting point that will allow me to be flexible in the early days of my development. In my role I use tools such as JIRA and I have found tools such as Trello potentially useful in the past, however I believe that Google Sheets will give me direct access to the data I need and be flexible, at least for the first few sprints.

I have my epics, I have basic stories and achievable tasks and habits derived from them, now I need to figure out what I stories I wish to prioritise and determine what my development team's limits (myself - physical and mental) are.

Below is my updated backlog with the stories I plan to tackle highlighted in yellow.  

I believe I can achieve the above stories, or at least begin to implement the habits required to succeed. For example, I don't want to stop reading following a sprint but I want to ensure I carve out a section of my time during the sprint, and all following sprints to dedicate to reading.

I believe that the first sprint those directly following will be incredibly important as they will allow me to:

• Identify my limits
• Time, body
• Ability to organise
• Burndown rate
• Progress
• To justify why I'm doing this!

Therefore setting up a positive environment to engage me in making the best progress is incredibly important.

Following the first sprint I will review my goals, fill out the backlog further and pull out which stories I think I can achieve next!

Thanks for reading

AT