Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at If you want to succeed with agile, you can also have Mike email you a short tip each week. Team Member’s roles and responsibility during product backlog Grooming. There are three primary roles in a Scrum team, Product Owner, Scrum Master and the Development team including QA. This agile refirement technique will help reconnect the leaders, business representatives, and subject matter experts with people who are much closer to the existing product’s challenge at hand. Organize people in small groups (2-4) and ask them to combine their lists in 6 minutes. Together they refine their lists, combine them into one document, and add new items.

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Seven Tips For Running A Virtual Daily Scrum
In this case, meetings on planning and updating the backlog alternate, and if you run them on the same day every week, you can settle into a regular rhythm that helps the team perform effectively. I like to hold the product backlog refinement meetings three days before the end of the current sprint. This gives the product owner sufficient time to act on any issues that are identified. Some teams find that doing shorter meetings every week rather than once per sprint are more suited to their cadence, and that is, of course, fine.
If you are interested in this agile refirement techniques, you can read more here. Make sure to engage with the stakeholders on a regular basis and keep their interests in mind. Easily keep everyone aligned on priorities, centralize all your customer feedback, and always know what to build with confidence.
It gives people a voice, makes them feel like they have been heard and allows you to address any conflict before it festers and becomes a problem. One popular Product Backlog Refinement technique, which works equally well in a project context, is to define what a ‘Ready’ item looks like. You then use this definition as your yardstick to check that items are refined to a consistent level, ensuring that you capture just the right amount of detail for each item – not too much, but not too little.
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. Does the strategic direction of the items in the backlog align with your customer personas? It’s worth revisiting your customer personas before the backlog grooming sessions.
The team may already possess those skills, or they can make a decision to designate someone in the team to acquire those skills. But you want the product owner to be leading these events and conversations with the team. So, that’s all the main aspects of the Backlog Refinement and ways of optimizing it with Backlog Refinement tool Standuply. With all our tips in mind, you definitely make your Backlog Refinement meetings really powerful. Also, keep up with our scrum world today that is actively using various tools to refine Backlog ranging from fun scrum practices to best Standup bots Slack and Microsoft Teams.
- Estimated — Backlog items at the top should include an accurate estimation of the work needed to deliver them.
- Shorter, sharper conversations that are deeply engaging for the team is going to yield far better results than in-depth conversations that drag on for hours.
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- You need to have conversations with them around the backlog items to help clarify their thinking around the item and help them articulate why the item matters to customers.
- 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.
- You’re creating psychological safety for the team and helping them find ways to respectfully agree and disagree with one another without that leading to unresolved conflict.
If you do decide to set up a recurring, regular Backlog Grooming meeting, the Scrum Master or Project Lead might direct the meeting. But, if you are trying to ascertain how much time an item is going to take to execute, the team members who will be working on the task are often best placed to make that estimate. The purpose of backlog refinement is to ensure that the backlog is populated with initiatives that are relevant, well-documented, and prioritized in accordance with the needs of the customer and organization. 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.
Is Your Team Involved In Backlog Refinement Backlog Grooming?
Every single backlog item is ranked in relation to its business value and alignment with the strategic goal of the company. Depending on the structure of your organization and whether you employ Scrum and agile methods, the backlog grooming process could be performed in the form of regular recurring meetings. Depending on how big your organization is and your company structure, your backlog can receive input from several different teams and departments.
To do this, hit Backlog Refinement — meetings with the product owner and the scrum team participation, during which the contents of the backlog are updated for the next sprint. Estimating product backlog items provides benefits beyond predicting when a project will be finished. Unlike other Scrum meetings, I do not think the product backlog refinement meeting requires the participation of the whole team. Remember, a backlog refinement meeting is not a one way communication from the product owner to the development team around what needs doing and when it needs to be completed by. The refinement sessions usually happen once or twice a sprint usually just before the end of the last week.
The meeting builds momentum and the team walk away feeling as if the meeting and conversations were productive, valuable, and actionable. You’re helping the product owner to lead the conversation by identifying what may be the most important item to discuss and helping them to communicate that effectively to the team. Product owners often forget that the development team speak a very technical language but don’t always speak the business language or understand the business objectives behind the work that needs doing. As a scrum master, you are going to help them with that communication. You’re going to help them understand what a good backlog item looks like, what the purpose of each of those items is, and how to communicate with their team. One of the objectives of the Backlog Refinement session is to make sure that all the information needed to begin a task is in place, so the task is in a ready state to be progressed as quickly as possible.
Yds: Who Attends Product Backlog Refinement In Scrum?
You want a healthy environment where people can bring up any issues they have or ask questions to gain greater clarity and this is where you are teaching the team to have those conversations. Your product owner may want to discuss things in a specific order whilst the team may want to discuss those items in a different order. You want them to be having those discussions and learning how best to work together.
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While the sprint planning meeting is an official scrum meeting, there is no compulsion to have a separate meeting to groom the backlog. The backlog is usually groomed by the Product Backlog Refinement person responsible for owning and maintaining the backlog. Although anyone can add to the product backlog, it is the product owner who prioritizes what the team works on.
Backlog Refinement Grooming Bot In Microsoft Teams And Slack
Your team can not worry about Backlog Refinement and its implementation. Then set Scheduling, select Respondents, and the way how you want results to be delivered. Standuply Backlog Grooming reports are fully customizable, you can tweak any option your team needs. There you can also meet Standuply’s multiple choice of all scrum ceremonies pre-filled templates Standup Meetings, Planing Poker, Backlog Grooming, and more. First of all, open your Standuply’s personal account and click the “Backlog Grooming” button when selecting from our list of pre-filled templates.

The best way to gather some of this information might be to loop in the relevant stakeholders. Expertise is an incredible resource; don’t lose out on the expertise of your stakeholders by keeping a narrow focus on the scrum team and the scrum team only. 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.
Features In Backlog Refinement Tool By Standuply
Left unattended, this could lead to a messy backlog with a lack of cohesive qualities across backlog items and an overwhelming number of outdated items. When done effectively, recurring backlog grooming sessions can keep your backlog in check and improve the organization of the items listed in it. If the team all tend to agree on the size of the problem or product feature, it’s a great sign that the team fully understand the problem and have grasped where that backlog item fits in the grand scheme of things. It is easier to embed best practices in your agile teams when you have strong processes and clear oversight.

Product Backlog Refinement is possible to be done during Sprint planning, although we at Exadel don’t recommend that, especially for new teams. For mature teams, where the product is well known and the team is highly experienced, this option can work, but for a new team or product, we suggest going with recurring Product Backlog Refinement meetings. But the Scrum Guide does not give a detailed description of how exactly to undertake this task. It provides flexibility and allows teams to choose the frequency of, approach to, and agile refinement techniques used in Product Backlog Refinement. The customizable nature of Scrum meetings is important, but you should still keep in mind the key elements of Product Backlog Refinement. Detailed Appropriately — User stories and other items in the product backlog that will be done soon need to be sufficiently well understood by cross-functional teams.
Ideally, a scrum master doesn’t need to be in a backlog refinement meeting at all. 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. Scrum masters have a secret recipe for effective Backlog Management in agile teams.
Techniques And Practices For Product Backlog Refinement
In fact, it takes strategic, deliberate thinking to maintain a well-managed backlog, through a process called Backlog Refinement . It also takes commitment, as refining the backlog is not a one-off task. It is a continual practice that needs to be embedded as a habit within a team’s regular working cadence. Mike Cohn specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques to build extremely high-performance teams. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile as well as the Better User Stories video course.
Step 3, make sure that conversations happen inside useful time frames. Step 4, make sure the team are prompted to estimate the size of items because that prompts deeper conversations that promote understanding. A groomed backlog helps your product https://globalcloudteam.com/ 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.
Backlog Refinement: Who Conducts And When
Provides the product owner, stakeholders, and team members with the opportunity to clarify requirements and change task priorities, if they need to. Successful product owners will see their stakeholders as a team, not merely a set of individuals. How to Run a Successful Sprint Planning Meeting Sep 13, 2022 A successful Sprint starts with effective Sprint Planning.