Sprint Planning with a Digital Aid Tool: Lessons Learnt

Abstract

Managing the product’s backlog is a major task in agile projects. This case study reports on one organization’s experiences from the transition to a backlog management tool and its contribution to improving sprint planning. Our key lessons learnt are that a tool is particularly appropriate to organize and specify backlog items in a transparent manner and to handle dependencies. However, we also observed an overhead in backlog management and in reporting during meetings. The concrete project settings play the paramount role in whether such a tool helps or harms the process.