The delivery team discusses how to maintain the integrity of their backlog items. They decide to?

Maintaining the integrity of an agile backlog means ensuring it remains a relevant, prioritized, and valuable source of work. A key practice in backlog management (or refinement) is to regularly review items to ensure they are still aligned with the current product vision and goals. Monitoring for "staleness" involves identifying items that have not been worked on or discussed for a long time and may no longer be relevant or valuable. This proactive cleanup prevents the backlog from becoming bloated with outdated requests, ensuring the team focuses on delivering current value.

A. Delaying changes is an anti-pattern in agile, as it allows the backlog to become disconnected from current business needs.

B. Developing a business case for all changes introduces excessive overhead and bureaucracy, hindering the team's ability to respond quickly.

D. Ensuring all changes are approved can create bottlenecks and disempower the team, contradicting agile principles of collaboration and autonomy.

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IIBA. (2017). Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide

Version 2.

Section 7.2

Backlog Refinement: This section describes the ongoing process of keeping the backlog orderly.

Section 7.2.3

Elements: This section explicitly lists activities for backlog refinement

including "removing user stories that no longer appear relevant" and "re-assessing the relative priority of stories." This directly supports the concept of monitoring for and acting upon stale items to maintain backlog integrity.

Sutherland

J.

& Schwaber

K. (2020). The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org.

Section on Product Backlog Refinement: The guide states

"Product Backlog refinement is the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items... This is an ongoing activity to add details

estimates

and order to items." Removing or updating stale items is an implicit and necessary part of this process to maintain a well-ordered backlog.