Sprint Backlog Maintenance

The Team have very few administrative tasks to get in the way of their work. They do have an important obligation however to keep the Sprint Backlog up to date. Scrum is an empirical process and does therefore need feedback on progress to enable early view of any action or decisions that need to be taken. The Sprint Burndown chart will not be useful unless it is displaying an up-to-date picture of the Team's progress based on the work remaining estimates in the Sprint Backlog.

New tasks should be added to the Sprint Backlog as they are conceived, and the running day-to-day estimated hours remaining for each task must be kept up to date. The estimate is the total estimated hours remaining to complete the task, regardless of the number of people that perform the work.

• Estimated work remaining is updated daily - immediately after the Scrum Meeting works well for many teams.
• This should not be confused with time reporting, which is not part of Scrum. There are no mechanisms in Scrum for tracking the amount of time that a team works.
• Teams are measured by meeting goals, not by how many hours they take to meet the goal. Scrum is results oriented, not effort driven.

The screenshot below shows the "Work Remaining" field of a Sprint Backlog item being updated. The Work remaining field will normally be updated by the team member who has selected the task; they should also update the "Current Status" field to reflect the changing state of the task.