Scrum: What's the average number of stories in your backlog [closed]

Question

I'm currently working on a productivity tool for Scrum teams and would like to know what is the average number of stories you see in a product backlogs at any particular time.

Just to clarify the number should not include completed stories or stories which 'might' be broken into multiple stories in the future. Also I'm interested in what people 'are' doing rather than what they 'should' be doing.

Unfortunately I don't get out and about enough to other peoples labs so only really have experience with what's normal for us.

I'm guessing there are quite a few consultants on this site who maybe get to see far more team rooms than I do.

Now I know this is a "how long is a piece of string" type question and there will be some people with two and some with two thousand, but I'm just looking for a yard stick.

For the teams in our company is is usually less than twenty.

Regards,

Chris

Answer 1

"Just to clarify the number should not include completed stories"

Got that.

"or stories which 'might' be broken into multiple stories in the future."

What? That's half our backlog.

There's always 5 ± 2 stories in the official backlog, because that's about all our product owner's brain can handle. When we finish a few, some more get tacked on the end as "well, we might want to look at this, too."

As architect, I can foresee an additional 5 ± 2 stories of a more administrative, technical nature.

Those are the top 9 stories in our backlog.

Plus there are always the vaguely defined stories "which 'might' be broken into multiple stories in the future." Interestingly, these appear to number 5 ± 2.

There are 3 or 4 of these, depending on your "'might' be broken into multiple stories" rule.

Beyond that, of course, additional people would like to throw stories at us. For example, our sales guy has 5 ± 2 stories that are part of a sales demo he'd like to see. It isn't core functionality, and it's vague and it "'might' be broken into multiple stories", so I guess it doesn't count.

I think it counts, BTW. Every story must be tracked. The change and mutate and get broken down, but it's impossible to discern "real" from "might get broken down". That's the point of prioritizing the stories -- vague or large or ill-defined notions can be tracked as backlog until they get so low priority that other projects are more important than the outstanding backlog.

The correct answer is (5 ± 2 stories) × number of stakeholders.

Answer 2

If you don't consider epics as you mentioned, I would say twice as much stories as you complete during one sprint. I think that will varie between 20-30 according to the size of the stories and the size of the team.

Currently we have 7 stories that aren't part of a sprint in the backlog. But we're currently building the backlog, so not much of a reference.