Customer to Requirements

Customer reports are triaged into categories. Some will be treated as defects in the product.

Defect reports must be prioritized and fed back into the development cycle at the appropriate point. For example, critical defects can be sent directly to development for action while defects with low impact can be sent to design specification group for consideration.

Many customer requests are valuable inputs to the product management, analysis, and requirements gathering process.

All customer reports must be captured in a database, typically one that is optimized for the purpose, called a defect tracking system.

Customer to Implementation

The users, clients, or customers have a direct link to the implementation when the product plans include a maintenance cycle.

Customer reports of problems go to triage, first in Support and later in Engineering. Reports that are approved by both support and engineering as Defects become work items for development and then part of the implementation. A mature process will include ways to expedite this flow.

Backlog

Some of the artifacts in each class will represent approved, agreed-upon, active, or completed tasks.

Others will represent proposed tasks, work approved but not scheduled, etc. These artifacts comprise the backlog. A backlog is a natural and healthy part of the development process as long as it is managed correctly. One of the themes of this discussion will be to indicate when and how to address items in the backlog.

Here are some of the categories of the backlog.

Requirements that are published but not represented in specifications and/or test plans are in the design backlog.

Specifications that are not implemented are in the engineering backlog.

Implementation artifacts that have not been tested are in the test backlog.

Test plans and automation that have not been executed are also in the test backlog.

Test results that have not been reviewed are in the results backlog.

Customer reports that have not been triaged are in the support backlog.

Customer reports that have been triaged as defects but have not been fixed are in the engineering backlog.

Defects that have been fixed but where the fixes have not been delivered to customers are in the release backlog.

These are the most important components of the backlog.