Artifact: Work Items List
This artifact contains all work that has to be done in project.
Domain:  Project Management
Work Product Kinds:  Project Data
Purpose
To collect all work that has to be done in a project, so work can be prioritized and effort estimated. 
Relationships
Description
Main Description

Project progress can be measured by understanding how the product is evolving compared to what has been requested to be done. Working demonstrations of the product can provide this comparison.

A work items list can also provide information about remaining work at any point in time. It consists of requirements of any nature (functional, non-functional), requests for changes, design constraints, infrastructure, architecture and technology work, and so on. See Concept: Requirements and Concept: Change Requests for types of work items that can be captured in this list.

This list is constantly updated with new entries, as the stakeholders have new requests, as the project evolves and the team better understands the problem domain and technology being used, and so on. Work is constantly updated in terms of priority, estimated effort (in days) and planned release, so at each iteration, tasks are assigned to team members in order to address the planned work.

For more information, see concept of "Product Backlog" in [SCH04].

Tailoring
Representation Options

As a separate artifact

This list be captured as a separate artifact, represented by a table or spreadsheet containing the following columns:

Name/Description        Type    Priority       Estimation (d)   Release      

  • Type = various types of requirements and change requests
  • Priority = Low (1) … High (5)

In databases

Requirements Management tools and Change Request tools are an option to capture the list of work to be done.

As part of the Project Plan

Instead of being represented in a separate artifact, this list can be represented as a section on the project plan, containing the same columns as above.

More Information