Agile Software Development

In this tutorial I demonstrate how you can manage your Scrum Product Backlog in a very simple Excel sheet based on a popular free template. Watch this screencast if you want to get started with Scrum. You will see how to get started, how to detail, inject and remove requirements, how to build burndown and velocity charts.

You can download the somewhat lower quality version of the tutorial from Google Video.

Update: Link to XLS fixed. Kudos to Jukka Laurila

Update on 09 Oct 2007: "See Also" section added

Bas Vodde collected and published examples and templates of the Scrum product and Sprint backlogs. Most of them are in MS Excel format. Some (XLS) include a lot of comments, some (XLS) are very colourful. Check them out, Excel can really cover most of the needs of the archived backlog tracking.

See Also

• Simple Product Backlog Example
• Simple Sprint Backlog Example

Once upon a time in a continent far-far away (from Europe) there was a mighty spreadsheet software vendor called Lotus Development Corporation. Their product Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the niche with its almost 100% market share. There was a neglectibly small competitor product named Microsoft Excel. The Microsoft's product better met user needs, integrated well with the word processor and in general was a good product. Unfortunately the Lotus'es overwhelming user base left not a lot of chances for any competitor whatever good he was.

The Microsoft worked real hard to lower the enry barrier. They mailed demo packages by post, built the Lotus-to-Excel convertors, even created a special version of the Windows OS, that could be started without the installation and could run the MS Excel trial only - pretty much everything, that could eliminate the trialing efforts. And the most cunning trick of the Microsoft generals was to introduce the really good Excel-to-Lotus convertor. Yes, you heard it right, Microsoft released the tool that customers could use to switch back to their old good Lotus 1-2-3 whenever they decide that Excel isn't worth any further trials.