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Your grooming sessions should involve a process of removing unnecessary backlog inclusions, such as now-irrelevant user stories, bugs and technical work. Team members can clarify whether old backlogs should remain, then help to prioritize those that make the cut. Doing so removes clutter that can distract from accomplishing necessary work going forward. The person who serves as the backlog grooming lead may differ based on the team and its needs. However, it is common for a Scrum master or project manager to lead. A backlog can include hundreds of items or more, so it’s important to categorize them using labels and epics.
Sometimes these recurring meetings can get tedious so a well-run meeting will make all the difference. Looking more extensively into the total backlog to enable long-range technical and project planning. Refining and reprioritizing previously written user stories and breaking them down into smaller stories, if needed.
Indeed, during refinement you should also check that the items are still actually relevant and that they haven’t morphed into something else in the meantime. When you’re done with grooming, you should have a set of well-documented tickets with a defined goal, acceptance criteria, and technical implementation notes, if the complexity merits it. You’ve thought through all different user types, how changes would affect them, and ensured there are acceptance criteria to cover those requirements. Remove items that are no longer relevant to the business goals and roadmap. You should aim to groom your backlog three-quarters of the way through every sprint so that the backlog is up-to-date and can be streamlined for sprint planning.
SolutionsMeeting agenda softwareCollaborate on meeting agendas, assign action items, and ask for meeting feedback. Another planning item that needs to be taken into consideration is dependencies and any research that needs to be conducted before acceptance criteria can be added and work can be estimated. Attendance at a backlog refinement event is ideally the entire Scrum Team, including the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and Development Team. There may also potentially be one or two stakeholders, if subject matter expertise is needed. The planning for Product Backlog Refinement sessions should be the responsibility of this core product discovery team.
After a minimal amount of work is done on each item on the backlog – enough to understand the resources involved to complete it — the Scrum Team has a refinement meeting. Some tasks cannot begin until another dependent task is completed. These dependencies can halt team members and delay progress if not identified or managed.
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In doing so, you reduce the number of meetings needed to get the same amount of backlog grooming done. As more information comes in, you should expect to update it with items and stories being added, removed and reprioritized. It’s constantly growing, shrinking, and changing as the team receives feedback from the project’s stakeholders. Backlog items may be deleted, added, or edited and may change in priority. Before a sprint can begin, the team needs a product backlog.
But what happens when your agency starts haemorrhaging talent? At worst, it can hamper your agency’s growth and lead to clients waving … Has tickets created by multiple users, showing the team is forward-thinking, and everyone is contributing. Consists of tickets that represent all the work that needs to be completed during a project, no matter how detailed the information.
The PO ranks user stories in order of their importance applying different techniques. User stories at the top of the list are to be implemented in the nearest Sprints. Teams should make an effort to make sure the priority items remain the most important. Score your Product Backlog items based on how much they matter to your project and the people who benefit from it. Consider metrics like customer value, ROI , or interdependencies. Make a note of which ones are high or low priority and which bugs need fixing.
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Some companies limit customer participation, but at Dialexa, the customer is a part of the team and we teach them the dance that is an agile project. We have found that educating and partnering with our clients in a transparent way is key to reducing surprises and increasing understanding of all involved. The goal here is for all attendees to leave the meeting with a clear understanding of what is left for project completion and the upcoming sprint goals.
- Maybe you think all this grooming is more trouble than it’s worth.
- Let everyone be heard and respected, but keep the team focused.
- These to-dos include — initially prioritized features, new feature requests, bug-fixtures to the developed features, and other activities.
- It also ensures that no customer-valuable item is forgotten.
- Then, during your meeting, practice and model active listening, use a DEEP format, prioritize the preferences and needs of the customer, manage your time well and note dependencies.
- Finally, burndown charts can also be used to communicate the project’s status to stakeholders.
- This helps the team to stay on track and to monitor progress.
In a backlog grooming session, the team prioritizes the backlog of tasks to be discussed during sprint planning. Based on that discussion, the developers commit https://globalcloudteam.com/ to work on a selected set of user stories. The outcome of the backlog refinement is the Sprint Backlog or a list of items that are due by the end of the Sprint.
Keeps Team Members Updated
It is at this point the team should vote on whether the backlog item they have refined meets the Definition of Ready. When done with a backlog grooming session there should be two sprints worth of user stories that the team is ready to work on. This way they have enough work to keep them engaged until the next backlog grooming and also work to do if priorities shift.
In these meetings, product managers and product owners can easily explain the strategic purposes behind prioritized items in their backlog to help improve the alignment across groups. Productive backlog grooming is a crucial skill to learn for product managers and their teams. You’re always going to have a backlog, but it’s not always going to be clean and easily understood. Usually, these updates are made during meetings with relevant stakeholders. The product owner will lead the meeting and have everyone look over the existing user stories in order to decide which of them can be taken off the backlog list. User stories can be added at this time, as well, or user stories are split to make them more manageable.
What to avoid with backlog refinement
Agenda TemplatesKeep all of your meetings running smoothly with these pre-built meeting agenda templates. Slack IntegrationCollaborate on meeting agendas, share notes, and exchange feedback – without leaving Slack. Cross-Functional MeetingsStay aligned on projects, drive progress and accountability, and improve collaboration. GuidanceGuidance allows admins to suggest talking points for managers to discuss during their 1-on-1s. This is where the need to follow Product Backlog Refinement best practices is pertinent. Let us discuss some of the top Product Backlog Refinement tips.
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Sprint planning happens before a sprint starts and after the backlog grooming session and is time-boxed (maximum of eight hours for a month-long sprint). A groomed backlog helps your product team deliver features more rapidly and keeps the organization moving forward. It reduces the time product managers and product owners spend planning sprints and increases the productivity of everyone involved in building the product. Review the product strategy along with business goals that you want to achieve to ensure that current backlog items are well aligned with them.
Who is involved in the backlog grooming process?
However, it’s not recommended to have too many people involved in this collaborative process. That’s why scrum teams use project management software to facilitate team collaboration. Attendees should include the project manager, the customer point of contact and key individual development team members, if required. A well organized backlog grooming meeting can save the time of valuable development resources.
More Doable Task Lists
When done effectively, recurring backlog grooming sessions can keep your backlog in check and improve the organization of the items listed in it. You are looking to accomplish a few things through grooming sessions. First and foremost, you want to make sure tickets at the top of the backlog are fully fleshed out and ready to be put into the next sprint. Have the team think through unknowns and any technical questions and assign needed research to appropriate team members. Week by week, tickets will become more defined, which may lead to additional tickets or supporting work. You also want to prioritize the remaining tickets, so the highest priority items get the most attention.
In this article, we will discuss 10 backlog refinement techniques that will help you get the most out of this process. Designed for colocated teams, the backlog refinement meeting can also work for distributed teams using tools like Planning Poker for JIRA and Hatjitsu. While a plan with stated goals is critical to intelligent backlog grooming, that doesn’t mean it has to stay the same. The product owner must keep an open mind and listen to what others in their team say to make changes as required. The most significant way to motivate your team ahead of sprint planning is by grooming the backlog beforehand.
Anatomy of an Agile User Story Map
Though not an official Agile practice, backlog grooming is a widespread practice helping the product teams stay productive. Value — the business value of the item, as determined by the person who runs the backlog grooming process. The individual who leads the meeting — product manager, product owner, or someone else. It is easier to embed best practices in your agile teams when you have strong processes and clear oversight. Your Backlog Refinement Meeting will naturally be longer than your regular Stand-Up meetings. But you don’t want it to be an hours-long slog that leaves the team frustrated and behind on their work.
These estimations should then be continually reviewed to update them based on current information. Cross-departmental teams can let their focus drift and become scattered if there isn’t a single source of work that everyone follows. The information in a backlog needs to be properly detailed and have context. Stakeholders from other departments probably won’t understand vague descriptions or technical jargon. You’ll also want to look at the key metrics up to this point and be ready to talk about any changes or discrepancies that have occurred recently. Every item in the backlog must be thoroughly explained with all the appropriate details.