Backlog prioritization assistant

When to invoke

• You have a backlog of initiatives and want a repeatable prioritization with transparent scoring.
• You need to generate a "next up" list for planning from a CSV export.

Inputs needed

• --input path to a CSV with one row per item.
  • Required columns: id, title, impact, effort
  • Optional columns: reach, confidence, cost_of_delay, job_size
• --method one of: rice, wsjf, simple.

Workflow

1. Validate required columns and parse numeric fields.
2. Compute a score per item:
   • RICE: (\text{reach} \times \text{impact} \times \text{confidence} / \max(\text{effort},\epsilon))
   • WSJF: (\text{cost_of_delay} / \max(\text{job_size},\epsilon))
   • Simple: (\text{impact} / \max(\text{effort},\epsilon))
3. Apply tie-breakers (higher impact, lower effort).
4. Emit a ranked JSON report with per-item rationale.

Output format

• JSON written to --output:
  • items: ranked list with score and explanations
  • summary: method and any validation warnings

Guardrails

• Do not claim the ranking is "correct"; treat as decision support.
• Never fabricate missing fields; default optional fields conservatively.

Reference code

• backlog_prioritization_assistant.py implements CSV parsing + scoring (stdlib-only).