Currently, Wikipedia Scrum Article defines “Sprint Backlog” as:
A prioritized list of tasks to be completed during the sprint.
It is my understanding that the “Product Backlog” is a prioritized list but that the “Sprint Backlog” does not have an order. I am looking for a definitive reference for the answer.
2
The scrum alliance / scrum foundation documents are not absolutely definitive on this however this is because it is implied all over the place. Logically the sprint backlog has to be ordered.
It is a more detailed sub set of the product backlog which is ordered and you plan by working through the product backlog in order of priority. Why wouldn’t you work on the highest priority?
Minimizing work in progress and swarming stories is encouraged because you want to maximize the number of complete stories, not have several half finished ones at the end of the sprint as those don’t meet the definition of done or have any business value.
Given the ethos of Scrum (prioritization, maximising business value, increasingly x-functional teams) it just wouldn’t make sense for this to be unordered.
2
I would argue that having “strictly ordered” product backlog i.e. a number ranking for each item in the list is waste.
Instead it’s probably more like a partitioned set
- Next iteration
- Next iteration +1
- Soon
- The rest
Investing time in ordering at a level of detail more than this is not going to be productive, as it will create the artificial notion of a fixed order when things are more likely to chop and change.
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For the sprint itself, the team need to hit the most valued items first – so yes it should be ordered. Estimations of size and velocity aren’t always going to be perfect, so there will be (infrequent) times when stuff needs to be chopped so that the other stories can be ‘done-done’ – which would naturally be those at the bottom of the list.