What Is Product Backlog in Waterfall?
A product backlog is an important part of every software development project. Some inexperienced programmers wonder: – “What is a product backlog in Waterfall”. To begin with, it is impossible to answer this question properly without defining the notion of product backlog.
A product backlog is an amount of tasks for a certain software development project. Product backlogs are usually used by Agile teams. Most of them formulate these task lists in a particular way. They have a special person in their team called the Product Owner, who is responsible for creating product backlogs. He gathers user stories on the functionality of the future software and prioritizes them in these lists. Hence, when the user demands are included into the https://hygger.io/product-backlog/product backlog, they are not tasks yet. The developers turn them into tasks only when they are ready to work on them.
Formally, Waterfall projects have no project backlogs. They have no customer representatives in their teams and they don’t use user stories. However, they still need to gather information on the customer’s view of the future software product. Usually Waterfall developers do that during their meeting with the customer that takes place before the beginning of every project. Waterfall team members document all requirements of the customer. These requirements are turned into tasks at the design stage. Hence, they have some similar features with items of Agile product backlogs. That is why some developers call initial project documentation in Waterfall “Waterfall product backlog”. After all, it does not really matter what they call it. The main thing is to document the customer’s requirements correctly and to implement them properly.
As you can see, the notion of product backlog can be applied to Waterfall projects without changing their sequential structure.
