The Art of Product Backlog Refinement

In general, we have found that smaller teams communicate better and are more productive. If Scrum Teams become too large, they should consider reorganizing into multiple cohesive Scrum Teams, each focused on the same product. Therefore, they should share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog, and Product Owner. Various processes, techniques and methods can be employed within the framework. Scrum wraps around existing practices or renders them unnecessary.

• Smaller, more specific refinements save time for stakeholders and subject-matter experts.
• Some teams shortcut this process by having one person estimate.
• Aim to refine your backlog once every sprint, during your sprint review and before your sprint planning meeting.
• The entire team comes back together, and the Product Owner looks at the brainstormed ideas and answers any remaining questions.
• Making dinner just became much more of a chore than originally anticipated.

It may be altered slightly with feedback from Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective; but there should be no major surprises. In the second refinement meeting, we should seek to answer all major questions, removed any blockers and be in a pretty good state for starting our next Sprint in only a few days time. One is phrased as a user story and the other is phrased as an end goal. 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. Depending on where you maintain your backlog, your daily practice may involve holding discussions about backlog items within Jira or GitHub. Developers and engineers should also be adding detail to backlog items as and when new information is available.

Why is Backlog Refinement Important?

This article will get some good practices and guidelines for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement. It gives us time to get started with the items we’ve planned this Sprint. We may have already gained some new feedback from those items we just started. This might inform the future backlog, and therefore items we need to refine as a team this Sprint.

If you are planning to change to a career in Scrum Master, my experience can help you get there. Although Scrum Teams are cross-functional, they work in a complex environment. Dependencies may hinder the Product https://globalcloudteam.com/ Owner from ordering the Product Backlog so that the value is maximized. Dependencies increase the risk of delays and hinder the Scrum Team from creating a usable increment until the end of the sprint.

Good Product Thinking

Scrum values iterative development and keeping customers in mind throughout the project cycle. So, the same concept should be kept in mind during the backlog refinement meeting. All the new user stories, discussions, prioritization, and other attributes should be tailed keeping customers in mind. For example, if a bug is causing trouble for customers, it should be addressed as soon as possible. This way, you maximize the value customers can get from your product, eventually leading to more success.

Find out how to create agile boards in Jira software with this step-by-step guide. Set up agile and jira automation to keep up to date seamlessly. Since the Teams in Space website is the first initiative in the roadmap, we’ll want to break down that initiative intoepics and user stories for each of those epics. The Product Backlog is an artifact that helps provide transparency. It is the “single source of truth” for what is planned in the product.

Technique Briefs

Then I realized that your articles are very easy to read and understand. In my country , it is not so easy to find documents on Scrum in native language and sometimes individuals are reluctant to read in a foreign language. At odd times, I am trying to translate your articles to Turkish in order to contribute to Scrum Mastery and maybe the Scrum community. Until now, I have translated your following articles into Turkish and published them on Linkedin. Empiricism is about incorporating the learning you gain as you build the product, as you better understand how to realize the product vision, as you see changes happening in your environment. Dependencies often turn into impediments and can grind a team to a halt.

So, invest more in discussions and motivate the participants to express any concerns they may have. A great way to avoid this is involving https://globalcloudteam.com/techniques-and-practices-for-product-backlog/ some members of the Development Team in backlog refinement. I teach participants to leverage the ELMO technique during backlog refinement.

Internal Product Opportunity Assessment

Instead, it returns to the Product Backlog for future consideration. The Product Owner and the Scrum Master should often collaborate to ensure effectiveness of the Product Backlog management activities as this process makes the work of the Scrum Team more valuable. The Scrum Master is the last and the only role required to implement Scrum. It is not a traditional project manager as the Developers are self-managing. Instead, the Scrum Master manages proper use of Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Master works with the Scrum Team as well as a wider organisation in adopting Scrum and agile practices.

Typically, they perform estimations with the most popular Agile technique — planning poker. 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. A backlog contributes massively to the success of an agile project. And there are no strict rules when it comes to refining a backlog.

Backlog refinement vs. backlog grooming

The objective should be to be focused and reach your goals strategically. One of the topmost Product Backlog Refinement best practices is to create the core team- this is the team that is dynamically involved in matching customer needs, user feedback with feasible features. This team should have people from sales and marketing, and the customer service team also. Vitality Chicago provides the Agile Training, Scrum Certification, and Agile Coaching that organizations need to increase business agility. Our Agile Training courses help teams boost productivity, optimize their development process, and deliver better customer solutions. Our Trainers and Coaches have the deep expertise to help you at all points of your agile transformation journey.

The Product Owner presents a user story and the Development Team asks questions to get a common understanding. They also discuss what needs to be done and how it needs to be done to satisfy the acceptance criteria. The meeting is usually recorded so that the Product Owner can document the summary afterward. 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. Work with your team to find the best process for your situation.

But build a habit of individual daily refinement

Refine how you refine with expert Professional Scrum Trainers. Have you ever left a training course excited to implement the things you have learned, only to be met with resistance or more questions on how to apply the concepts? In this workshop we take classroom concepts and apply them to your actual Product Backlog. Virtual delivery – requires teams to join a Zoom meeting from a computer with video turned on. 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. T-shirt sizing gives teams the opportunity to break L or XL projects down into smaller and more manageable parts that are good candidates for the Sprint.