Backlog Refinement, aka Backlog Grooming

Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox. They are structured and empowered by the organization to manage their own work. Working in Sprints at a sustainable pace improves the Scrum Team’s focus and consistency. These values give direction to the Scrum Team with regard to their work, actions, and behavior.

Backlog refinement sessions present an opportunity for product managers and product owners to explain the strategic purposes behind prioritized items in the backlog. These conversations can help improve alignment across the cross-functional team. Prioritising stories is a consequence of how important they are to the business, what other stories depend them on and how much effort they will take to deliver. If the other backlog refinement activities have already been partially or mostly automated, the team can spend more time discussing this in the backlog refinement meetings.

Product Backlog

Product Backlog refinement is the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items. This is an ongoing activity to add details, such as a description, order, and size. Identifying roadblocks and minimizing risks related to backlog items.

Of course they should also know what work has the highest priority. As part of the product backlog refinement, should be to put the most valuable work higher up the list. Again, as a Scrum Master, you need to help your product owner to do this on a continual basis. There are two simple methods you can use to help your product owner improve the product backlog refinement right now.

Fibonacci Agile Estimation: What Is It and Why Does it Work?

To plan and execute demo sessions to demonstrate what the team has built. Product Backlog Refinement helps the Scrum Team to be updated and in keeping the current understanding of the product and objectives. It provides an appropriate, detailed and estimated degree of product’s priority. Creating and reassessing the relative priority in the backlog list as per new needs. By asking these questions earlier, the product owner is given a chance to arrive at answers to any questions he or she may not be prepared to answer immediately. Creating new user stories and removing others according to new knowledge.

• Having a weekly refinement session helps your team to keep their finger on the pulse of the backlog without it becoming overwhelming.
• But unlike Sprint Retrospectives or Sprint Planning meetings, which have a clear time and place in the agile process, there isn’t much guidance on how and when to do Backlog Refinement.
• These questions do not need to be fully resolved in a backlog refinement meeting.
• In Product Backlog Refinement, feedback is given and accepted either by team members or from customers.
• This will give everyone a better sense of where things stand and how close they are to completing the project.

Backlog Refinement provides the first input to Sprint Planning. To start, it assures the Product Owner properly conveys the project / product objectives to the Scrum Team that will inform the sprint goal. Further, it ensures the Product Backlog remains populated with user stories that are relevant and detailed.

The Product Backlog: 14 First Principles to Help Your Scrum Team Succeed

There’s a common misconception that backlog refinement is another event that can be timeboxed for an hour at the end of the Sprint. Digité provides Artificial Intelligence-driven project/ work management solutions. We empower your teams to do their best work with our innovative products. If you think you shouldn’t do it near the end of a Sprint, you’re probably cutting refinement too close.

The Product Backlog document can be the cornerstone of all Agile efforts in a team. It provides some very real benefits like effective sprint planning, monitoring sprint outcomes, and incorporating real-time feedback into the development process, among others. As long as the same team members don’t miss the meeting each sprint, I think it’s fine to conduct backlog refinement meetings with about half the team plus the product owner and ScrumMaster.

Come prepared to backlog grooming sessions

It’s wise to shift around priorities before the backlog grooming session rather than during it. However, some teams prefer to re-prioritize user stories in the backlog together so everyone can discuss why things are moving around. Everyone who attends a backlog grooming session should do some form of preparation ahead of time.

Without shared understanding, you risk implementing the wrong thing, wasting effort, and having to rework the implementation to get it right. Are ordered according to their priority in terms of business value and effort required. That’s why there are always key stakeholders present in these meetings.

It’s also not that uncommon for the Scrum Master , a project manager, or another team member to lead these sessions. The product backlog can address anything deemed valuable by the Product Owner Team. For the purpose of sprint planning, when you use Scrum as the delivery framework, product backlog items must be small enough for the team to complete and accept during the sprint. Verify items are implemented to the satisfaction of the Product Owner team. I like to hold the product backlog refinement meetings three days before the end of the current sprint. This gives the product owner sufficient time to act on any issues that are identified.

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Remove completed items

Lets take a pause and read about scrum interview questions first. High-functioning agile teams have a lot of shared context and developers are regularly consulting the backlog. Because of this, the team can move through issues more quickly, so refinement doesn’t need to happen as often.

You really should have at least 2 or 3 Sprints’ worth of fully refined items. That also ensures you have ample time to answer any questions. Improving clarity and https://globalcloudteam.com/ preventing misunderstanding by adding details in preparation of implementation. For example adding examples, constraints, edge cases, and acceptance criteria.

Perhaps it needs just three steps — draft, edit, submit — to be more effective, or if the team is familiar with the process, even just one. One possible solution to consider is to be diligent about iterating when writing your stories. Take at least two attempts to craft the story and ensure sufficient information has been conveyed. In the beginning of a new team or new product, everyone comes.

And re-sized for new information and as an item gets closer to implementation. Identifying risks and obstacles for items close to implementation. Without ordering your Product Backlog in descending order of prioritization, you risk working on items that aren’t all that important, and missing important ones. Without sizing each item, you’re not taking the ‘cost’ of items into account and risk overrating high-value, high-cost items, and underrating lower value, lower-cost items. Let’s inspect the goals of Backlog Refinement from the previous section. Importantly, don’t rush to remove things at this stage — make sure they are fully completed and can be taken out of the backlog without a future issue.

During the event, the Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished in the Sprint and what has changed in their environment. Based on this information, attendees collaborate on what to do next. The Product Backlog may also be adjusted to meet new opportunities. The Sprint Review is a working session and the Scrum Team should avoid limiting it to a presentation. Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint.

Backlog Refinement: What It Is and Why & How You Do It?

Prepare yourself to communicate not only what they are but also why they’re important. If you can’t explain why something is a high priority in the backlog, it isn’t ready to be there. In Sprint meetings team members are given great opportunities to communicate with others and identify each other’s strengths to build effective deep backlog teamwork and achieve common sprint goals. Sprint Planning is all about knowing and being up to date with the new requirements and product readiness to deliver it to the customers. Communication is the key requirement here, as each team member needs to give feedback for the prepared prioritised products in the backlog list.

If you’re working in two-week Sprints this process gives you two refinement sessions per Sprint. Having a weekly refinement session helps your team to keep their finger on the pulse of the backlog without it becoming overwhelming. By the same token, spending 10% of your time on backlog refinement doesn’t mean scheduling one meeting at the end of your Sprint and ignoring your backlog until then.

Refinement is an iterative process that allows the understanding of an item to improve before it is taken into a sprint. One of the keys to good scrum is a well-refined product backlog. The Product Backlog can be a critical artifact for your Scrum team’s path to success. However, in a complex environment without experts knowing the answers to all problems, merely stuffing all requirements thrown at you into a Jira project won’t do the trick. More important than the list itself is creating a process around feeding validated hypotheses into the Product Backlog. For that purpose, consider the above-mentioned Product Backlog principles to help you succeed with this creative challenge.

Even then, it might seem like you’re squeezing a lot of work into a short block of time, but if you’re properly prepared you can easily have effective sessions. While executive stakeholders may want to participate , they usually don’t need to be present during grooming meetings. As the product owner or product manager, your conversations with stakeholders should happen in advance of backlog refinement sessions, not during. And backlog refinement is one event that is not listed but also plays a crucial part. It often takes place before Sprint Planning and involves breaking down the product backlog items into smaller and more manageable ones so that the Scrum Team have a clear view. That means the entire cross-functional team should be represented at refinement sessions.