this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I always kind of hated how non-committal POs were with that. It seems like any experienced dev knows backlog is effectively /dev/null. So, if you actually treat it as such, you can skip refining stories that will not be tackled any time soon and you can purge stories from backlog aggressively (or work with filters to hide them), so that your board shows actually relevant stuff.
But POs will always be like, oh no, we can't delete this story that we spent all of 5 minutes to write. It might still be relevant. We must remember that we still need to do this (and then not do it anyways)...
In my experience, that's not a problem of commitment, but rather budgeting and priorities.
There's always something more urgent than that one refactoring ticket, but you also don't want to effectively delete a clear indication of a problem.
I mean, I agree with that. Maybe "non-committal" isn't necessarily the best word. I'm mostly saying, assuming that POs realize backlog won't get prioritized nor they'll be gifted money to work on it, they should lean into that fact more.
They could sort backlog for chance of ever becoming relevant enough again and then delete the lower 90%.
Or I don't know, any card that sits around for more than 6 month is deleted. I've rarely seen an issue older than 6 months that wasn't wildly outdated anyways.
Or my preferred flavor of chaos: If it's actually a problem, you don't need a card on a board to remind yourself of it. You want a card for the when and how, but not that you need to do it.