Real-life backlog and how to deal with it

Have you also had this uncomfortable feeling that your product or sprint backlog is so different and so less tidy that the examples you read in books or articles? I have had it. For some time I even believed that there are those legendary teams and companies somewhere whose backlog is just like from a book. Fortunately, I no longer believe it. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's an example of a difference between tidy, theoretical backlog of User Stories and a real-life backlog that we deal with on a daily basis.

Product configuration complexity

 I was once told a story about a software company that existed in the '90s and worked, among other things, on a GUI library that was meant to be so deeply configurable and customizable as no other GUI library in the world.

If they had a slider being built, they wanted the slider to work not just linearly from value A to B, but they wanted the developers to be able to assign a function (not necessarily linear) to the slider, so that when the user moves the slider, the resulting value comes from the function.

And the same with any other control they wanted to built. There was so much complexity involved that the company had never actually shipped the library.

This example is on the high end spectrum of making a product configurable. Let's take a look at a simplified picture of the spectrum.