A once-per-Sprint meeting can be very powerful if the team have been engaged with the backlog throughout the Sprint. 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. Estimating the effort of backlog items should always be done during your group discussions, since arriving at an estimate is a negotiation.

When a Product Backlog is not refined, it leads to misunderstandings and a messy Product Backlog which lacks cohesive qualities across Product Backlog items and increases an overwhelming number of outdated items. However, a refined Product Backlog is always manageable and makes it simpler and easier for the whole team to understand the Product Backlog items and efficiently contribute to product development. Now, it’s time to gather your troops and create a shared understanding of your user stories, and prioritize them on value and cost. Backlog refinement is about creating shared understanding on what the Product will, and won’t, do and on what it will take to create it. Product Discovery, both initially, for example through Story Mapping, and on an ongoing basis.

What happens in a backlog refinement meeting?

As time goes on and Sprint Velocity improves, you may want to make coordinated refinement meetings less frequent – weekly or once per Sprint. 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. Having a weekly refinement session helps your team to keep their finger on the pulse of the backlog without it becoming overwhelming. One question that comes up fairly often is “how often should our team do backlog refinement and how much time should we spend doing it?

This implies that these Product Backlog sessions can take various forms in different companies. The same also implies to the attendees for these sessions, as they also vary among the organizations. There is no hard-and-fast rule for who needs to attend the sessions. However, all the members of the meeting are the people who work directly or indirectly affect the project, the organization, and the strategic goal of the project. All the attendees are the facilitators of the meeting and not the commander, and hence, their word is not final. Every Stakeholder also has the responsibility to attend the Product Backlog Refining sessions.

The user stories are discussed during grooming, an open discussion between the development team and product owner, to help the team better understand the functionality required to complete a story. This includes design considerations, integrations, and expected user interactions. Sprint planning needs to happen right before the sprint but after the sprint review and retrospective.

This is why it’s sometimes so hard to draw a line between the two positions or jobs. If you listen to the music of your team, you’ll find your refinement rhythm in no time. When that happens, you can experiment by shifting daily refinement to weekly refinement to lower the burden at the end of the sprint but keep your finger deep backlog on the pulse. To start, he implemented a ‘bug triage’ meeting – the developers would go through tricky bugs he’d picked and try to solve them together or at least understand them. The team was stretched from Poland to the Pacific, so this synchronous call was one of only two hours they spent all together in a given week.

Who should backlog refinement?

You really should have at least 2 or 3 Sprints’ worth of fully refined items. Product Backlog Refinement, also referred to as Product Backlog Grooming, is a method for keeping the backlog updated, clean and orderly. PBR is a collaborative discussion process which starts at the end of one sprint to confirm whether the backlog is ready for the next sprint. The purpose of Product Backlog Refinement is to add details, estimates and order to the Product Backlog and it’s Product Backlog Items.

Effort is the clue here, because each person completes the same task in a different amount of time, while the steps are always the same. Scrum Framework is one of the frameworks that is widely used in many Agile organizations due to its simplicity and advantages it provides to the organization. Scrum has many principles and values which are integrated during product development and delivery that gives the product a superior quality. Hence, several industries have chosen to implement Agile in their organization through the Scrum Framework. It’s also called story time, pre-planning, and backlog management. Product Backlog refinement is the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog.

What is user story grooming?

Imagine for a second that your team is a super-fast bullet train. You’re even able to go around corners and tackle some unexpected bumps at speed. Refinement helps teams shape-up well-sized, detailed and discrete pieces of work that can be tackled in future Sprints. This type of preliminary work allows the development team to deal with the most important PBIs at an early stage and to ask questions that would otherwise only arise during Sprint Planning. This gives the PO the opportunity to find the answers in time for the Planning Meeting.

Adding detail helps teams form a better idea of how long a task may take to complete and what resources are needed to complete it. Backlog refinement incorporates several different activities, such as t-shirt sizing, Sprint Poker, and prioritization. And when estimations are more accurate, it’s easier to plan the correct amount of work for the Sprint and fewer tasks carried over into the next one. As a rule, your product backlog should be closely aligned to your product roadmap. In Scrum, scope is estimated in relative units of measure such as Story Points. In the sprint, the team can focus more on the actual work, because the most important questions were clarified in the refinement.

In preparation of the Backlog Refinement , the Product Owner should remove user stories that are no longer relevant and create new ones based on the Scrum Team’s discoveries from the previous sprint. Grooming can then begin with the goal of refining the set of user stories the Product Owner has initially prioritized at the top of the Product Backlog. Product Backlog Refinement is not a timeboxed event only loosely defined in the Scrum Guide. A crucial guideline in Scrum for Product Backlog Refinement is that five to ten percent of every Sprint must be dedicated to Backlog Refinement. During Product Backlog Refinement, items are reviewed and revised.

Reminder—What is a Product Backlog?

When you’ve answered all of these questions with your team members, it’s ready to be added to the backlog. Ensuring that the upcoming user’s stories are meeting the “definition of ready” by adding any information and meeting the acceptance criteria. Agile Developer’s can fall out of sync sometimes when the objectives and outcomes change frequently just like any large-scale team project. Hence, by holding regular Product Backlog Refining sessions, teams can easily align their workloads and make sure that the project stays on track. If you have a Product Backlog that’s messy, unclear, and unordered, it makes for a chaotic and inefficient Sprint.

Product Owner Product Owner Journey Become a product owner and learn how to implement agile product development. Because requirements in Scrum are only loosely defined, they need to revisited and clearly defined before they come into the Sprint. This is done during the current sprint in a ceremony called Product Backlog Refinement. Discuss user stories with the team, answer any related questions to smooth out any ambiguity.

What does the sprint backlog contain?

And working with change comes in many shapes and forms, one of them is working with product backlog regularly. Traditional project management approaches, like Waterfall, have become less popular partly because they’re not flexible at all and fail to adapt to change. As a result, waterfall projects’ results are often dissatisfactory and irrelevant. This would give everyone a better understanding of what needs to be done, how long it will take, and when it can be completed. For example, they may need clarification on how long a task is expected to take or what sort of resources are needed. They also are usually the first point of contact for user feedback or activity and can suggest new features, tasks, or outcomes that might need to be added.

• Every Stakeholder also has the responsibility to attend the Product Backlog Refining sessions.
• The Scrum Guide gives a lot of guidance on when the different meetings should take place.
• So a task goes into the to-do list only if the team has the capacity to take over a task that’s awaiting its turn in the backlog.
• And the best advice we can give you is to have the meeting regularly, put effort into it, and the result will be good.
• Teams that approach backlog refinement solely as an event will struggle to refine their backlog appropriately.
• Let’s go through a few of the most common refinement activities so you can boost your arsenal of tactics and refine backlog items even better.
• You really should have at least 2 or 3 Sprints’ worth of fully refined items.

Once you’ve added to the product backlog, it’s time to clean it up by removing any completed items. These could have been done in the previous sprint session, or have been marked as unnecessary for some other reason. Scrum consists of several specific sessions and meetings including sprint planning, which we will explore in more detail later. But for now, it’s important to understand that it is all about collaboration and keeping everyone on the same page. The goal of the Product Backlog Refinement session is to review any outstanding User Stories in the Product Backlog and prioritized correctly such that they are prepared for the Sprint Planning.

Start a project with 10Clouds

Saving prioritization activities for the refinement meeting might be the safest way of ensuring everyone is aware of why items have moved up or down the backlog. By the same token, t-shirt sizing helps identify backlog items that are actually Epics and should be broken down https://globalcloudteam.com/ into multiple backlog items. If your backlog items are in good enough shape, you might try out t-shirt sizing with your team. Let’s go through a few of the most common refinement activities so you can boost your arsenal of tactics and refine backlog items even better.

It is constantly being changed, updated, and reordered to reflect the reality of the project. At times, the backlog will no longer accurately represent the correct list of things that need to be added to the project, or misrepresent the priority of each task. The Product Backlog Refinement in Scrum does not fall under the main Scrum Events as a formal meeting structure.

Why Product Backlog Refinement is Important

Product Backlog Refinement is one of the main tasks of the Product Owner that decides the workflow of the entire Scrum Team. A good Product Backlog always encourages the Developer to create the right products and decide the best Product Backlog items for their Sprint during the Sprint Planning. Great Product Backlog management ensures that the cross-functional teams are communicating effectively and maximum productivity is reached.

During Backlog Refinement the Scrum Master facilitates as the Product Owner and Scrum Team review the user stories at the top of the Product Backlog in order to prepare for the upcoming sprint. Generally, newly formed teams or those adopting agile for the first time, will want to start off adding refinement time to the end of daily stand-ups to build a habit of continuous engagement. By the time everyone knows what’s what, you have 10 minutes left to add depth to user stories, hold detailed discussions, or estimate effort. Having a dedicated meeting also gives you the time to dive deep on individual tickets, build user stories together and discuss tickets in detail.

Sprint planning is done in collaboration with the whole scrum team. The What – The product owner describes the objective of the sprint and what backlog items contribute to that goal. The scrum team decides what can be done in the coming sprint and what they will do during the sprint to make that happen. Additionally, the process helps product managers explain and align the organization behind the strategy that informs the backlog items.