Automatic backlog priority?

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Urban Turtle does not allow for automatically assigning priority. This could be achieved via Excel however.

I suggest we turn this question into an idea, and I will add it to our backlog.

Okay, so what am I supposed to do now? I can't just specify backlog priority manually. Takes too long. How does everyone else handle this?

Managing the priority of backlog items is the responsibility of the product owner. As far as I know, most people do this by hand. While I agree that the proposed idea could be used to help the product owner determine the priority, I don't think that backlog priority should ever be turned into a simple calculation. There is more to it than maths!

I'd really like to hear from other users regarding this though. Should lead to a great discussion.

The role of the product owner it to manage the product backlog and ensure delivery of value. The product backlog should be organized and ordered to maximize value decisions. ROI index provides valuable input when ordering the backlog, nevertheless there is much more to setting the order of the product backlog items than to simply sort by ROI index. Consider for instance the following methods for ordering the product backlog:

* by priority (however it is calculated)
* by development cohesion
* by business cohesion
* by implementation cohesion
* by release intention

My suggestion is that you work with the Development team to organize the product backlog in a way that maximizes the value the Scrum Team creates.

Ordering backlog items automatically is a good idea when a very large number of items have to be sorted (400+). However, it requires that the busness value AND the realization cost have been entered manually for each of them (it is still a long process). I did this in Excel for managing a list of 1500 change requests in a large product (30 modules). Once the business value and effort were calculated, a third of the requests were dropped, and only the top 200 requests were entered in the scrum tool, leaving the rest for the next product release cycle since new requests were coming in every week.

Prioritizing by ROI (I supposed that is what you're doing : business value divided by effort) is a common practice to set the initial priority in a huge backlog.

From what I've seen in projects, product owner do it at the beginning of projects to save some time. From that moment, they usually manage priorities by hand, because there are more things to consider : risks (that you would want to mitigate) and technical dependancies are two examples.

In the last project I started, I used Excel to build the initial backlog, I ordered it by ROI, and then I ignored the column while importing into UT/TFS. I then threw away the excel sheet :)

This is important, this issue alone makes or team to use the sprtint backlog list instead of urban turtle. A button for auto-assigning backlog priority based on business value would be perfect.