BAM - Backlog Assessment Method

Abstract

The necessity of software as stand-alone products, and as central parts of non-traditional software products have changed how software products are developed. It started with the introduction of the agile manifesto and has resulted in a change of how software process improvements (SPI) are conducted. Although there are agile SPI methods and several agile practices for evaluating and improving current processes and ways-of-working, no method or practices for evaluating the backlog exists. To address this gap, the Backlog Assessment Method (BAM) was developed and applied in collaboration with Telenor Sweden. BAM enables agile organizations to assess backlogs, and assure that the backlog items are good-enough for their needs and well aligned with the decision process. The results from the validation show that BAM is feasible and relevant in an industrial environment, and it indicates that BAM is useful as a tool to perform analysis of items in a specific backlog.

Story points changes in agile iterative development

“…However, in practice, SP are often initially estimated based on incomplete information. Such information may be discovered late or changed (Hoda and Murugesan 2016;Svensson et al 2019), which may lead to the SP changes. To minimize the impact, there are needs to better understand the SP changes and an automated approach to predict the SP changes.…”