I’m starting with scrum and saw many partial examples on books and tutorials, but when try to use scrum in the real life, it’s not easy to write the user stories and create the product backlog. I want to see a real project with user stories, product backlog and sprint backlogs to see if I’m doing it in the correct way.
Is there any open source project with a public product backlog ?
Is there any shared complete user stories and product backlog from a real project?
3
Theres two ways to do this – like everything the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be to get someone with experience involved, a mentor / consultant / trainer etc, have them learn your work situation and provide the advise you need. The hard way is to read a book, then jump in a do it, get some of it right, make some mistakes, recognize and learn from them, and refine things next time around (sounds like you could use Scrum to learn Scrum).
I’m a hard way kind of guy – all you can do is back yourself, accept you won’t get it right first time, but will learn nothing from not starting, and get on with it. You will probably learn numerous bad habits on long the way, so where possible use a mentor (and Q/A sites like this) – and be open to criticism and self criticism.
Referring to the OP – it’s not easy to write user stories – you are correct – it’s not easy, if it was, then Scrum would not be around and waterfall would be just fine. No one claimed scrum makes it easy (at least, no one who knows what they are talking about). Software development is hard, Scrum is a a way to manage the hardness, maybe making it easier or as easy as possible through better management. Scrum cannot make things “easy”.
Checkout Scrum and XP from the trenches. It’s exactly what you’re asking for: stories of people who are actually using Scrum.
1
It is certainly a paradigm shift. It will take some time to understand, adjust the mind set for any team to be effective with Scrum approach/process.
There is no short way or silver bullet that will direct you to the most accurate scrum management of the project; where user stories are gathered and backlog items are created. However, as it is an iterative approach, by looking at good samples, learning and using Scrum ceremonies “the team” may get into the most beneficial/suitable approach that fits into the company culture.
Is there any open source project with a public product backlog ?
There are several good posts that pit-point some artifacts, thus you may find them useful:
- Learning Scrum – The Product Backlog
- EF Core in GitHub
- Agile Planning and Iterations
- Simple Product Backlog Example
- Simple Sprint Backlog Example
2
Instead of books, you can also try some project management software, which follows scrum methods. Some applications also analyze, if you are doing it the right way by some rules. There should be a few applications on the internet, either as a desktop application or as a webservice.
Personally I wouldnt do it exactly by the book, but rather apply it to your workflows iteratively and improve your current project management processes by scrum and other agile methods. There are a few, which are very similiar to scrum. So in the end you could have some variation, which is easier to adopt for you and your team and still as effective as the original.
2