Is it possible that you’ve undervalued or overlooked stories in your backlog that will return thousands of dollars on every hour of your effort? Are you sure you’re working on the most important thing?

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In my last post, I introduced you to qualitative cost of delay and CD3. I argued that rational teams should order their backlog for maximum economic benefit and that you can use cost of delay divided by duration (CD3) to do that. Because software developers aren’t accountants, I used the easier to understand qualitative cost of delay and CD3 in my examples. But in this post I’m going to discuss at the advantages of switching to quantitative cost of delay.

I know this stuff isn’t as interesting as reading about the latest advances in AI or your favorite framework. But trust me when I say that learning to order your backlog by quantitative CD3 will help you take your effectiveness to the next level.

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Ordering your backlog for maximum economic benefit is a hard problem. The average team is being pulled in several directions at once. New features requests, technical debt, existing defects, non-functional requirements, security, risk mitigation, resource shortages, and more are all competing for your team’s attention. So, how does a rational team decide what to work on? In this post, I’m going to show you how to prioritize your product backlog by CD3, which is cost of delay divided by duration.

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Simultaneous feature development is a common but often economically sub-optimal software development practice. In this post, I’m going to look at the financial implications of simultaneous feature development and show you what you can do instead to achieve better outcomes.

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