Working in OnTime this week, I heard an old complaint that I've heard repeated time and time again. I had gotten so accustomed to it that I had forgottent he problem existed.
Everything about Scrum is related to priorities. The Product Owner has to collect input from stakeholders and prioritize the backlog accordingly. Of course, customer voting is part of that, but it is not all of that. There are many other reasons, including business and technical reasons, that affest the priority. Voting alone doesn't solve the problem, as technical problems could required "more voting power" that other items.
One of the reasons that I missed this in my beta testing is "Priority Order". Long ago, we hid OnTime's "Priority" field and replaced it with a custom integer field called "Priority Order". This field, which holds values from 1 to the total number of items in the list, is how the Product Owner prioritizes the list prior to a Sprint Planning Meeting.
The headache we have today relates to changing the order of an item in this custom field. If the Product Owner is alerted of a technical or business need to move item 2000 to slot 25. He changes 2000 to 25, giving him two 25s. He then has to manually change the old 25 to 26, and then change 26 to 27, and 27 to 28, etc.
As you can imagine, with thousands of backlog items, this is an impossible task. Our Product Owners get around this by exporting to Excel, changing priorities, and then re-importing. It works, but it is still a real pain.
I checked the beta this morning, but I did not immediately see a solution to this problem.
Has this been addressed?
If not, I apologize for not thinking of this sooner, but it is a really big problem for Scrum shops.
HL Arledge