Backlog Grooming: How to Prepare and Run Refinement Meetings in Scrum

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. To reduce complexity, it is held at the same time and place every working day of the Sprint. If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers. The Sprint Goal, the Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint, plus the plan for delivering them are together referred to as the Sprint Backlog. Various practices exist to forecast progress, like burn-downs, burn-ups, or cumulative flows.

If you’re not sure how often to schedule a refinement meeting use this handy decision tree or read more about when refinement meetings should take place. Refined backlog items are a bit like all the pieces of track that are ready to lay down in front of the train to get you to the end destination. But unlike other agile rituals, such as retrospectives and daily standups, teams have a lot of flexibility on how and when they do backlog refinement. Always have someone with «doing» skills (e.g. coder for software), someone with a visual mindset (e.g. a UI/UX person), someone with a test mindset, and the product owner. This ensures all aspects of creating an increment are covered in the refinement.

While proven useful, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making. Each event in Scrum is a formal opportunity to inspect and adapt Scrum artifacts.

Effective product owners seek input and feedback from customers, designers, and the development team to optimize everyone’s workload and the product delivery. A team’sroadmapandrequirementsprovide the foundation for the product backlog. Roadmap initiatives break down into several epics, and each epic will have several requirements and user stories. Let’s take a look at the roadmap for a ficticious product called Teams in Space.

But a better way is to remove this user story from the current agenda as most probably it needs to be reworked. Everyone in the Dev Team makes up their mind about the number of story points for this user story. When ready, they simultaneously reveal the cards with the corresponding story points.

The size does not express the absolute size of the Product Backlog item but the size in relation to the other items. Scrum Teams use relative sizes because people can determine relations more easily. The purpose of backlog refinement is to make improvements to the product backlog. Though there is no official ceremony detailed in the Scrum Guide, the activity of refining the Backlog is. The product owner then organizes each of the user stories into a single list for the development team.

Add backlog items so everything is recorded

User stories involved should be clear to all team members and be ready to be implemented in the upcoming Sprint. Later, at the Sprint planning event, the Scrum Team finalizes a set of user stories for the Sprint and plans the tasks it will take to complete them. The refinement meeting is facilitated by the Product Owner or the Scrum Master.

• On the other hand, this approach does not consider value at all.
• You can read in more detail about these and other prioritization techniques in our dedicated article.
• Backlog refinement is the process of discussing, breaking down, gathering details, and estimating backlog item.
• Others do it continuously, and check in together once per sprint.

The following are some of the tools that are used in the backlog refinement. To de-scope user stories that are no longer considered to be relevant. Usability testing is a way to test how intuitive the design, user flows and content is in your product, app or website. Usability testing consists of asking real people who are similar to potential users to perform various tasks on your product. You can use the information gained from this exercise to identify opportunities for improvement in your product’s design, user flows and content. Socratic questioning applied to projects and product development relates to finding the real need by establishing a thesis of what your stakeholder thinks their need is .

Backlog Refinement (Backlog Grooming): How to Embed Best Practices

The focus is on what is needed and why, rather than on how to solve the business need. The Product Owner invites a “celebrity” (an end user, subject matter expert, Product Owner, etc.) to the backlog refinement. Someone on the team should be chosen as an “interviewer.” Agree within the team about who will document questions and answers. The Definition of Done is a quality standard that represents all the things that a product backlog item must meet to be considered “Done” by the Scrum Team. The Definition of Done is also considered to be the exit criteria that each item needs to meet at the end of the Sprint.

Many agile practitioners say a “DEEP” product backlog is the key outcome of a backlog refinement session. Sometimes the scrum master or project manager and delivery team will use this session to estimate stories and assign story points. In order to achieve the above statement, the PO is responsible for having prioritized stories to refine and provide enough time for the team to investigate. It’s a good idea to send out a list of the stories for refinement a few business days ahead and ensure everyone bakes in slack time during sprint planning for this work.

What is a product backlog?

But he needs to be supported by a team that is cross-functional with representations from teams that handle customers directly and the product Developer. This team should have people from sales and marketing, and the customer service team also. It is important to call only key Stakeholders or top representatives from each team.

Various processes, techniques and methods can be employed within the framework. Scrum wraps around existing practices or renders them unnecessary. Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques, so that improvements can be made. The definition of done is an agreement on the set of conditions that need to be true in order to consider a backlog item done and at a point where it can deliver value to stakeholders.

Product Owner

In order for the refinement process to be considered a success, the team needs to agree that the item has been refined to the extent that it is now actionable. As a result, there would be little point in going through the process without consulting the team. Get them involved, so that they can verify that items are being refined to the correct extent. This pre-work need not be extensive, it just needs to capture some basic information about the request so that the actual discussion in PBR goes quicker.

It should have enough detail that they can inspect their progress in the Daily Scrum. The Scrum Team identifies the most helpful changes to improve its effectiveness. The most impactful improvements are addressed as soon as possible. They may even be added to the Sprint Backlog for the next Sprint.

On the other hand, this approach does not consider value at all. That means you might find you’re delaying high-value items for a long time, because they never rise to being the smallest effort. On a team level, this can be more difficult as you’ll need to collaboratively estimate how much effort different stories take.

Practice while you learn with exercise files

You can read in more detail about these and other prioritization techniques in our dedicated article. If you want your agency to succeed, you need to set your operations up for success. This includes everything from process to hierarchy, which determine backlog refinement techniques project success, client satisfaction, workplace culture, and more. If you are interested in this agile refirement techniques, you can read more here. Each group checks every item on its Max Spec list to see if it correlates with the purpose.

The answer to «who attends/» is «The scrum team decides.» Who are the people needed to be able to move refinement forward on the items being discussed? Not everyone on the scrum team needs to be at every session. Trying to refine everything in one go denies you the advantages of perspective. Refinement is an iterative process that allows the understanding of an item to improve before it is taken into a sprint.

Detailing out backlog items with the highest priority

Start with two 90-minute sessions spaced a day apart and see how that works for everyone. If you’re unsure whether you need to do this process, take a look at the below benefits. You could use a dedicated tool to help you refine or estimate, such as Easy Agile TeamRhythm, or you could just rely on a spreadsheet or a whiteboard and pen.

The Context Leadership Model is a tool for determining the appropriate project leadership style given a product’s uncertainty and complexity. The commitment scale gauges a stakeholder’s commitment to a https://globalcloudteam.com/ project, as well as what is needed to ensure the project’s success. Emergent- is for the new ideas that should be kept adding to the Product Backlog as and when the newer discoveries are being made.

Let us understand the basics of Product Backlog Refinement first before we proceed ahead with understanding the best practices. The challenges with these frameworks are all in the details. Because this is a formula, everything needs to be quantified. You may be able to get Reach from some analytics tools, but Impact and Confidence will likely be estimates. The better or worse your estimates, the better or worse your prioritization.