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I'm starting with scrum and saw many partial examples on books and tutorials, but when try to use scrum in the real life, it's not easy to write the user stories and create the product backlog. I want to see a real project with user stories, product backlog and sprint backlogs to see if I'm doing it in the correct way.

Is there any open source project with a public product backlog ? Is there any shared complete user stories and product backlog from a real project?

Yusubov
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Camilo
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  • What exactly do you feel uncertain about? I can't share my back log, but happy to give advice... – Kris Van Bael Oct 01 '12 at 23:10
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    Welcome to the site! It might be better if you ask specific questions about the aspects of scrum that you're having trouble with. Then we can give specific advice that addresses those. – Adam Lear Oct 01 '12 at 23:15
  • Thanks for your offer. I don't have a specific question about scrum at this moment. I want to see how others apply scrum and use their backlogs as a reference to complement the learned in books and tutorials. – Camilo Oct 01 '12 at 23:43

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Theres two ways to do this - like everything the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be to get someone with experience involved, a mentor / consultant / trainer etc, have them learn your work situation and provide the advise you need. The hard way is to read a book, then jump in a do it, get some of it right, make some mistakes, recognize and learn from them, and refine things next time around (sounds like you could use Scrum to learn Scrum).

I'm a hard way kind of guy - all you can do is back yourself, accept you won't get it right first time, but will learn nothing from not starting, and get on with it. You will probably learn numerous bad habits on long the way, so where possible use a mentor (and Q/A sites like this) - and be open to criticism and self criticism.

Referring to the OP - it's not easy to write user stories - you are correct - it's not easy, if it was, then Scrum would not be around and waterfall would be just fine. No one claimed scrum makes it easy (at least, no one who knows what they are talking about). Software development is hard, Scrum is a a way to manage the hardness, maybe making it easier or as easy as possible through better management. Scrum cannot make things "easy".

mattnz
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It is certainly a paradigm shift. It will take some time to understand, adjust the mind set for any team to be effective with Scrum approach/process.

There is no short way or silver bullet that will direct you to the most accurate scrum management of the project; where user stories are gathered and backlog items are created. However, as it is an iterative approach, by looking at good samples, learning and using Scrum ceremonies "the team" may get into the most beneficial/suitable approach that fits into the company culture.

Is there any open source project with a public product backlog ?

There are several good posts that pit-point some artifacts, thus you may find them useful:

Yusubov
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  • "Is there any open source project with a public product backlog ?" I'd like an answer to that. All these _examples_ are just _examples_ and don't show real-life application. It's the difference between learning to write Hello World and factorial programs in university and really hacking out a serious server application at your job. – ADTC Nov 11 '17 at 12:36
  • @ADTC of course there are real product backlog, Like the one in EF Core project - https://tinyurl.com/yax46rk4. In some teams, "product backlog" is associated with a feature in the pipe that team agrees to implement. – Yusubov Dec 15 '17 at 02:55
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Checkout Scrum and XP from the trenches. It's exactly what you're asking for: stories of people who are actually using Scrum.

Martin C. Martin
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Instead of books, you can also try some project management software, which follows scrum methods. Some applications also analyze, if you are doing it the right way by some rules. There should be a few applications on the internet, either as a desktop application or as a webservice.

Personally I wouldnt do it exactly by the book, but rather apply it to your workflows iteratively and improve your current project management processes by scrum and other agile methods. There are a few, which are very similiar to scrum. So in the end you could have some variation, which is easier to adopt for you and your team and still as effective as the original.

Eduard
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    This really doesn't answer the question. The question is looking for "real life" examples and your answer doesn't address this and is fairly vauge for someone who doesn't understand how to apply SCRUM methodologies. – Walter Oct 07 '12 at 15:32
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    I was just adding another way to learn scrum or other methodologies in "real life". I saw there are already a few other answers, but I found they were lacking of one example how you can learn it. We are doing it just by this way and are highly effective. – Eduard Oct 07 '12 at 16:44