Scrum For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3

Planning Your Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

Visualizing your product roadmap

Turning your work into actionable-size chunks

Managing your master to-do list

Following common practices to expand the backlog

William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century logician and Franciscan friar, said, “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” This statement is known as Occam’s Razor in simpler, modern-day terms. (When you have two competing theories that make the same predictions, the simpler one is better.)

In other words, keep it simple. You can apply this mantra again and again when managing your work with scrum. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.

In this chapter, you see that keeping things simple applies to a technique that we use to enhance scrum — called the product roadmap — and decompose your product’s features into the smallest requirements possible.

Throughout this book, we point out common practices that scrum trainers and coaches use successfully. Although they’re optional, we recommend that you give them a try. They will help you accomplish the outcomes you target. ...