Introducing Product Backlogs

In the Scrum framework, a product backlog refers to a prioritized list of functionalities which a product should contain.  But simply put it is a to-do list of all the most important enhancements, problems and bug fixes that you want to resolve to improve your product.  As a first step of providing Scrum support in Xurrent, the concept of product backlogs has now been integrated in the platform.  For accounts that have the ‘Agile boards’ setting enabled in the ‘Account Settings’ section of the Settings console, the product backlogs are available from the Records console.

A product backlog has a name, an image, a product owner and a rich text field that can be used to describe the product goal, the definition of done and any other relevant information.  But its most interesting property is that it can contain a long list of related requests and problems that can be ordered by priority.

Ordering a product backlog is easy: just drag and drop until the order is the way you want.  All specialists of the account can access the product backlog and update the order of backlog items.  Placing a selected item directly at the top of the list or removing it from the list altogether can be done from the menu that becomes available after pressing the Actions button from the header.

Requests and problems can be added to a product backlog by selecting one or more items from their respective views or the Agile board, pressing the Actions button and then selecting ‘Add to Product Backlog..’.  After selecting the desired backlog, these items are then added to the bottom of that list.

A request that is placed on a backlog will have its status updated to ‘On Backlog’ if the status was not ‘Workflow pending’, ‘Waiting…’ or ‘Waiting for Customer’.  The same goes for problems, but here the status is also not updated when it was ‘Progress Halted’ or ‘Change Requested’.  Both requests and problems now have an added Product backlog field from which the product backlog it is related to can be seen or changed.

The demo data has already been updated to contain an example product backlog.