Succeeding with Agile

Adding Detail to the Product Backlog

Chapter 13, “The Product Backlog,” stressed the importance of shifting from writing about requirements to talking about them. Many teams have found, however, that when distributed, they cannot shift as far away from requirements documents as they would like. Martin Fowler has said that “with greater distance, you need to put more ceremony into communicating requirements” (2006). Summarizing her experiences with a distributed project’s product backlog, Elaine Therrien of First American Corelogic says that “supplementing the high-level user stories with more detailed specifications helps to empower offshore resources. More detailed requirements enable the team to gain insight into the feature and the end user ...