Chapter 13. Prioritizing the backlog
Have you ever run out of time on a project and started skimping on testing, training, or usability? Have you ever delivered a project and then been amazed that the customer only used about 20 percent of the functionality? These common issues illustrate the need for prioritizing features within a project.
When you prioritize features, you ensure that you deliver the most valuable functionality to your customer first. You do this by iteratively building feature sets and deploying these features after each iteration if needed. For example, you may find that you need three iterations of work to complete your project. In this instance, you put the critical, minimum functionality needed in iteration 1, followed by high-priority features in iteration 2, followed by medium-priority features in phase 3. Each iteration concludes with usable features that could be deployed to your production environment if needed. The power in this approach is you can still deliver critical parts of your project if issues are encountered along the way. You won’t need to compromise on the quality of the features you deliver, and the customer can still receive a usable system.