Instead of chasing after the latest 'bright pebble' and falling down a rabbit hole that diverts you away from other work, just add it as a Story to the Backlog and then evaluate it against other Stories before starting the next Sprint. One of the big advantages of the Backlog is that you now have somewhere to record all of the tasks arising from new things that come up. The Backlog is the list of all the Stories, Tasks and Sub-Tasks that remain to be done. These can be used to break a Story into Smaller Components. They were originally called User Stories in software projects because they were expressed in terms of what the user needed, to ensure that software teams produced apps that people would actually use. A simple project may consist entirely of Epics and the Stories that must be completed to achieve its goal. StoryĪ Story is the next highest level of job in a Scrum project. It's goal will normally be expressed in general terms and will be a what is to be achieved, not a how to achieve it.

EpicĪn Epic is the highest level of job in a Scrum project and will be comprised of a number of smaller tasks.

We will use the bare minimum of the factors needed to maintain a Scrum project. We are looking at the other end of the scale, so we are after simplification. As might be expected, something that is used to control multi-million dollar projects has many ways of tailoring itself to their requirements. There are many complex ways of documenting a Scrum project.

Scrum project planning tools