Five Tips to Improve Product Backlog Refinement in Scrum

You might reorder the user stories on your backlog, or better describe them to avoid issues later. Assignments and estimates might change and you can identify and remove roadblocks if possible. This will not only keep your backlog less cluttered but also speed up your backlog grooming sessions.

At the end of a backlog refinement session, you should have a prioritized list of user stories. You want the items at the top of the backlog to contain the highest level of detail. Any larger stories near the top should be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks. Before a sprint, the scrum team meets and discusses backlog refinement, which is why it’s often referred to as a backlog refinement meeting. It usually begins with the product owner showing the scrum team what product backlog items need refinement. This opens up a discussion between the product owner and the scrum team.

You could look at backlog refinement as a means to a mutual understanding between the product owner and the scrum team. This understanding is focused on the product, of course, and what it will or won’t do. Then, you decide the amount of effort necessary to implement, as well as the order to do it.

Come prepared to backlog grooming sessions

As you capture new user insights, the backlog will be changed to adapt to customer needs. Identifying roadblocks and minimizing risks related to backlog items. Once the Scrum Team has refined the feature set, they should begin assigning estimates to the user stories and correcting those for any existing in light of newly discovered information. However, everyone (i.e. the Scrum Team, Product Owner, and Scrum Master) should understand that estimates are not final until those user stories have been accepted into the Sprint Backlog.

The backlog serves as the connection between the product owner and the development team. The product owner is free to re-prioritize work in the backlog at any time due to customer feedback, refining estimates, and new requirements. Once work is in progress, though, keep changes to a minimum as they disrupt the development team and affect focus, flow, and morale. Common items on the definition of ready include acceptance criteria discussed and understood by the team, user story statement , dependencies cleared, and subject matter expert identified.

To create a valuable list of tasks, shareholders and clients should take part in the discussion. That way, the backlog will reflect the accurate and up-to-date needs of the end-users. Backlog refinement is the process of discussing, breaking down, gathering details, and estimating backlog item. The focus is on what is needed and why, rather than on how to solve the business need. At the end of the day, it’s up to you and your team to figure out what you need to complete during backlog grooming based on your own process and needs. For example, if the team is working on a web application, they may have a backlog item for designing the home page.

Visiting the backlog regularly to shape items during the Sprint

This rough estimation method is particularly useful for making sure that items are the right size to enter the Sprint Backlog in the future. When we focus too much on what we need to do, we often limit our options. We are blinded by tasks and minutiae and don’t take time to think creatively about the bigger picture. As items get closer to the bottom of the funnel they become more refined and accurate. Backlog items being discussed by the Parabol team directly in GitHub.

Without it, the team wouldn’t be able to deliver the ultimate value since the developers wouldn’t know which tasks are the most important from the client’s perspective at the time. Is a result of the Product Roadmap – a visual summary of the company’s vision based on the business goals, both short- and long-term. If the roadmap is a plan, the Product Backlog is the to-do list of how to make this plan a reality. Sprint Planning keeps the backlog clean and healthy without any mess so that the products are delivered on time and with full customer satisfaction.

The prepared backlog list is discussed and estimated for the demo purpose in the Sprint Planning meeting. Only members involved in prioritizing backlog product list attend the Backlog Refinement meeting. Sprint meeting helps the team members to select achievable Sprint Goals based on their capabilities and estimations. The team members are able to recognise tasks and are able to prioritise items for delivery. For the delivery of products in the demo sessions, the products are reviewed in the meeting. To plan and execute demo sessions to demonstrate what the team has built.

Product Backlog Refinement Process

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. While refinement is a continuous process, it’s important to have a scheduled time where you sit down together as a team and go through the backlog together. 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. Here’s a useful decision tree to give you some guidance on how often to meet with the team for backlog refinement discussions. It’s important to separate the dynamic act of backlog refinement from all team backlog discussions.

Conversely, items down the backlog should only be roughly estimated as they are not that well understood yet. The Product Backlog refinement is a continuous process to create actionable Product Backlogs, enabling a Scrum Team to run Sprint Plannings at a moment’s notice. Consequently, refinement is about creating alignment among all team members about the Why, the What, the How, and probably even the Who regarding the upcoming work for the Scrum team’s https://globalcloudteam.com/ Product Goal. As a result, Product Backlog refinement is a critical success factor as it drastically increases the team’s capability to deliver valuable Increments regularly. 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. With backlog refinement your team have a chance to shape how you want to work.

Properly refined stories are easy to estimate, test and implement. All things said, the best approach is to ask the team if they share the perception and what they’d like to do to experiment if this could be mitigated. Integrations deep backlog Integrate Infinity with various software you use daily. Get a detailed Infinity demo with one of our customer support agents. Project Management Plan, manage, and track all of your projects in a single place.

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. When you’ve built a high Sprint Velocity, a once-per-Sprint refinement session might be the most time effective approach for you.

Backlog Grooming

The second example is completely disconnected from the user experience. It doesn’t give the team context for why that development work is important or what it delivers for users. You want to be in a situation where you have 2-3 sprints-worth of track ready to be laid down at any time.

They usually acquire this degree of transparency after refining activities. 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. The Product Backlog refinement is a continuous process to create actionable Product Backlogs.

Sprint Retrospective

Nothing gets built unless it’s on the backlog, but listing an item on the backlog doesn’t guarantee that it will be executed. The backlog refinement process ensures that only the most relevant tasks get committed for delivery in the following sprint. Feel free to break the product backlog items during the meeting.

• Product backlog refinement is the process of shaping and prioritizing items on the product backlog.
• The Scrum Team may refine these items during this process, which increases understanding and confidence.
• Or they may treat refinement as a continuous flow and leave refinement of the backlog items until mid-sprint when they are ready to develop the backlog item.
• There’s an opportunity to find a backlog refinement rhythm that works for your team and helps you to increase or maintain sprint velocity.
• I like to hold the product backlog refinement meetings three days before the end of the current sprint.

This competence of the Scrum team is critical to creating trust with the management and stakeholders by regularly delivering valuable Increments. And despite that, it’s still one of the most crucial parts of the agile process. During Sprint Planning, the team will take the items at the top of the Product Backlog and move them into the Sprint Backlog to be worked on during the upcoming Sprint. Some people may have additional knowledge about a specific type of problem or the code base that others don’t, which makes this a great opportunity to share information.

The 2020 Scrum GuideTM

This process helps to appropriately size items and assign them a value in terms of hours of work. Estimation is important because it helps teams make sure they are taking a reasonable amount of work on in each Sprint. But creating a habit of daily micro-refinement, helps ensure all team members know what’s on the backlog and add detail when they have it.

Product Backlog Refinement is a session where the team discusses the items that should find their way into the Sprint Backlog. PBR is not just about adding and removing items; it’s also about making sure that team members understand the details of each item. It’s the Product Owner who manages and maintains the Product Backlog. However, both the Product Owner and the rest of the team can create the backlog together.

There’s an opportunity to find a backlog refinement rhythm that works for your team and helps you to increase or maintain sprint velocity. 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. Every backlog item has a user story that explains why it exists. Items often become smaller as well, as some large backlog items are broken into multiple smaller items that are either more discrete or a more appropriate size. There are oh-so-many techniques you can use to take rough backlog items and polish them into shape.

That’s why we focus on better data visualization in the Reports module. This is just a beginning, as we aim to expand the range of report widgets successively. Scrum Guide, The Sprint Backlog is a plan by and for the Developers. It is a highly visible, real-time picture of the work that the Developers plan to accomplish during the Sprint in order to achieve the Sprint Goal. Once the Product Backlog is streamlined, the Scrum team can use it to create a Sprint Backlog, which is exactly what the next part of the post is about.