International Journal of Modern Computer Science (IJMCS) ISSN: 2320-7868 (Online)

Volume 3, Issue 2, June, 2015

Product Backlog Prioritization in Scrum: A Review

Charanpreet Kaur1st Vijay Kumar 2nd
Department of CSE, Department of CSE
Chandigarh University, Chandigarh University,
Gharaun, Mohali, Punjab, India. Gharuan, Mohali, Punjab, India.
E-mail: chkaur10@gmail.com E-mail: vijaykumar_nrw@hotmail.com

Abstract: Scrum is emerged as one of the flexible and lightweight agile approach in IT industry. The key element of its flexibility is evolving
requirements and delivery of business value in small releases. Identification of correct candidate requirement (which is most likely to be
included in sprint backlog) for a certain release is necessary to deliver highest business value early. Prioritization is an effective way to identify
correct candidate requirements. However, in scrum, prioritization is not static and easy process as in traditional development methodologies
because of evolving requirements. To prioritize requirements there are different techniques which have been explained in literature. Different
techniques consider different factors for prioritization. Value-based prioritization is the best technique which is used in scrum. In this paper a
narrative review has been done to explain factors which are considered for prioritization. A small survey has been done to find the answers of
questions which arose during literature study.

Keywords: Scrum, Prioritization, Product Backlog, Value-Based.

I. INTRODUCTION
Software systems have become the backbone of almost all
business operations. Advancement in technology and business
needs force customer to evolve their project requirements day
by day. Evolving requirements is a big challenge in software
development. Agile methodology is the best solution to work
with such evolving requirements. Scrum is one of the efficient
agile methodologies to provide flexibility in development.
Scrum follows incremental and iterative approach to provide
delivery of valuable product features in several releases.
Product backlog items which have to implement are prioritized.
Prioritization is difficult and ongoing task in scrum because of
evolving requirements. Ignorance of any crucial product
backlog item can make the customer unsatisfied. Therefore
prioritization process is the core activity in scrum and should
be done carefully.
This paper is intended to review the prioritization in scrum.
The review has been conducted through literature survey. The
objectives of this review paper are:
1. To identify the factors for the selection of product
backlog items during prioritization process.
2. To answer the questions that arose during literature
survey.
This paper has been arranged into five sections. Related
work has been given in section 2. Section 3 which is entitled as
“Discussions” has divided into three sub-sections describes the
product backlog, prioritization and factors respectively. Result
of survey has been given in Section 4. In the Section 5, the
conclusion and future work has been given.
II. RELATED WORK
Many researchers have presented the Agile Requirement
Engineering. Traditional development focuses on gathering and
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analyzing requirements before going to design phase. However,
Agile welcomes the changing requirements even late in the
development lifecycle. A.D. Lucia and A.Qusef has surveyed
the real processes and activities of agile requirement
engineering. Customer collaboration, good agile developers
and experienced project managers are the secret of success of
agile requirement engineering. [15]
M.Kumar et al. has provided a hybrid approach for agile
requirement engineering with the help of Joint Application
Development (JAD) and viewpoints. JAD and viewpoints
serves as a key tool for requirement gathering. The aim of
hybrid approach is to serve the purpose of agile requirements.
[9]
A.Batool et al. has proposed a conceptual framework. The
emphasis of conceptual framework is to make the requirement
process more effective. This framework also minimizes the
complexities and barriers faced during the traditional
requirement engineering process. [5]
H.Elshandidy, S.Mazen has provided a requirement
engineering task in agile and traditional methodologies.
Requirement elicitation, Requirement Analysis and negotiation,
Requirement modeling, Requirement Validation and
Requirement management are the five requirement engineering
tasks. By comparing these tasks, it is concluded that by
bringing agile into world of requirement engineering will
guarantee a greater and a faster success. There are many
promising requirement engineering research areas in which
agile can be perfectly fit. These areas are solving problems
related to variability and component reuse in SPL, verifying
models of adaptive systems, or developing tools/
approaches/techniques/patterns to help taking technologies
from research to practice. [6]
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 International Journal of Modern Computer Science (IJMCS)
Volume 3, Issue 2, June, 2015
A.Iqbal et al. has analyzed AHP (Analytical Hierarchical
Process), SERUM (Software Engineering Risk: Understanding
and Management), EVOLVE and VOP methods that are used
for requirement prioritization with the different factors such as
cost, value, risk, benefit, dependency constraint etc. They
concluded that there is no single technique that addresses all
these factors. The proposed approach addresses all the factors
for prioritization. After dependency constraint check the
requirements reach at second step where they prioritized by
using VOP. The output of this step is a set of requirements that
should be implemented in current release. However, there are
other factors too that should also considered. Implementation
effort, resource constraint and benefit factor addresses by the
step three, four and five. [18]
Selection of group of important requirement to be
implemented in iterations is achieved by continuous
requirement prioritization. R.H.AL_Ta’ani et al. has proposed a
conceptual framework that outlines the factors and activities
involved in the requirement prioritization process. [7]
R.popli et al. has proposed importance and effort related
factors. Prioritization of user-stories is highly dependent on the
value of these factors. The relation of importance and effort has
been calculated to decide the priority of user-story. [2]
III. DISCUSSIONS
A. Product Backlog
Product backlog is one of the crucial artifacts in scrum. It is
the prioritized list of requirements for the product to be
developed. It is dynamic artifact in scrum because it evolves
throughout the scrum process. Change in customer
requirements and environment in which product will be used
causes evolving of product backlog. The requirements in
product backlog are called product backlog items and can be
enhancement, bug and new user-story. Product owner, who is
the representative of customer, has a responsibility to create
and keep the product backlog updated.
Refined Product
Highest Priority backlog items and
ready to
implement in
PBI can be:
sprint.
Feature,
Bug,
Enhancement
Big user-stories
that cannot be
implement in one
sprint.
Lowest Priority
Product Backlog
Figure 1. Product Backlog
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ISSN: 2320-7868 (Online)
B. Prioritization
Scrum focuses on customer satisfaction by providing the
business value early. However, ignorance of criticality of user-
stories will result in unsatisfied customer [2]. Prioritization is
the process of determining the inclusion of candidate
requirement in the certain release [15]. Value-based
prioritization is the core principle of scrum. These different
techniques consider different factors for prioritization.
Requirement prioritization facilitates requirement engineering
process by providing:
1. Improvement in customer satisfaction
2. Constraint management
3. Focused product backlog delivery
4. Risk reduction
There are different prioritization techniques which consider
different factors for prioritization. Scrum uses Value-Based
prioritization technique to arrange the product backlog items.
Product backlog items which are highly valuable and important
for customer are kept at the top of product backlog item.
Along with business value of product backlog item other
factors such as dependencies, risk, cost, availability of
resources are also taken into account during prioritizing. These
all factors have been described in Sub Section C.
C. Factors for Prioritization
1) Business Value
Business value is an importance related factor [2] which is
used to prioritize the requirements in scrum. Business value is
the estimation of money will be provided by the user-story to
organization. Higher the business value higher will be the
priority of requirement. Business value can be estimated with
two following concepts:
a) Positive business value
Positive business value is equivalent to the profit that will
earn in business by delivery of important requirement.
b) Negative business value
If important requirement is missing its business value will
goes negative instead of being zero [16]. Therefore
consideration of negative value is also important as positive
business value.
2) Cost
Cost is also the big concern in prioritization process. It is
calculated in terms of money. The requirements that project can
afford to implement first, may have highest priority [18]. Cost-
benefit analysis can be used for the prioritization.
Cost is also utilized for the calculation of Return On
Investment (ROI).Sometimes the customer and the
organization may decide to move important feature (that could
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 International Journal of Modern Computer Science (IJMCS) ISSN: 2320-7868 (Online)
Volume 3, Issue 2, June, 2015

give higher ROI) lower down the priority list just because the respondents via email. Among 10 respondent 8 has given the
amount of effort required to develop it. response which has been collected in spread sheet format.
3) Risk From 14 questions, only 5 questions have been extracted
The high risks user-stories assign with high priority. This which are related to the objective of this review paper. The
ensures that changes in requirement can be caught early in summary of these questions have given in bar chart Error!
project. As soon the team will be able to mitigate the Reference source not found.. X-axis of bar chart represent the
unknowns, thus they will able to remove uncertainty, thus they questions and Y-axis represent the number of respondent
will lead to a higher-quality product [3]. response for particular option (Strongly Agree, Agree,
4) Dependencies Disagree, Strongly disagree).Five question and the percentage
Dependency between requirements also affects the
of agreed respondents has given in Table 1.
prioritization. Dependency means the requirement or set of
requirements is dependent on another requirement or set of 8
requirements [18]. Let us suppose that there are two Features A 7
6 Strongly Agree
and Feature B. Feature A has three sub-stories one of which is 5 Agree
4
dependent on feature B. Feature B itself has two sub-stories. 3 Disagree
Customer has give the higher priority to feature A. If developer 2 Strongly Disagree
1
team thinks they should develop the first two (non-dependent) 0
sub-stories out of the three for Feature A, they need to talk to Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5
the PO and customer and discuss whether that will deliver
sufficient value. If they say yes, then deliver feature A with two
Figure 2.Summary of Survey
sub-stories. But if delivering two sub-stories from Feature A is
not delivering value to the customer, then move Feature B to Table 1. Questions included in Questionnaire
the top of the product backlog, which will remove the Sno. Question Respondent
dependency of that third Feature A sub-story [12]. Agreed (%)
There are two types of dependency constraints known as Q1 Product backlog item represent as 75%
user-story format “As a user I
Precedence Constraints, Coupling Constraints. Precedence want…………..so that…………..”.
constraint occurs for the requirements that can be start Q2 Story points of user-stories change 75%
implementing after the complete implementation of another during grooming and sprint backlog
requirement on which they are dependent. However, coupling meeting?
Q3 The priority of user-story will 87.5%
constraint occurs for the requirements that must implement in
increase if it is a bug.
the same increment [18]. Q4 The priority will increase if the 75%
5) Resources product backlog item is highly
Resources are the budget, staff, schedule and technology refined during grooming and sprint
which are necessary for effective operation [2, 18]. Resource is planning meeting.
Q5 The priority of user-story will 87.5%
one of the important factors which impact the prioritization.
increase if a reusable code is exists
Unavailability of particular resource at time can lead the task from previous projects.
towards delay. Therefore it should also be considered during
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
prioritization.
6) Security From the review it has been concluded that prioritization of
Security can be considered as network security, code items in product backlog plays a vital role to deliver business
security, documentation security and functional security based value in small releases. During Literature study it has also been
on customer requirements [2]. Security is a constraint which observed that maturity of requirement is not considering as
can impact the prioritization of product backlog item. Security important factor for prioritization. Prioritization of immature
must be taken as higher priority factor. requirements can be the wastages of time. In Future work, we
are going to propose a new factor called maturity of items of
IV. RESULTS OF SURVEY
product backlog. This factor can also impact the prioritization
An online survey by questionnaire has taken to find the of product backlog.
answers of questions which arose during literature study. Total
14 questions was included in Questionnaire and sent to 10

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 International Journal of Modern Computer Science (IJMCS) ISSN: 2320-7868 (Online)
Volume 3, Issue 2, June, 2015

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