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. They then decide which user stories are in need of product grooming.

Also, a detailed product backlog highlights dependencies between the tasks, as well as the tasks that can be performed simultaneously without damaging the process. It means that the teams work smarter, wasting less time waiting for someone else. It is important to start with the roadmap because it will allow the team to see the long-term plan and understand the sequences better.

Precise iteration planning

Working on the backlog can get confusing and unproductive with too many people involved, so resist the urge to invite every team member to keep the session on track. You can prioritize them by various factors, including risk, cost-to-benefit considerations, and dependencies. Once the team completes an item, remove it from the backlog. The client should have a chance to weigh in before the meeting, too. Open communication keeps all stakeholders and team members involved and informed of project progress.

• The product owner usually conducts the session as soon as user stories are ready from a product, design and technical perspective.
• Stakeholders should be consulted regularly, both internally and externally .
• Then beneath the highest-level backlog are multiple area backlogs, which each describe a specific feature area and are managed by a designated product owner.
• From your insights, you create and prioritize your roadmap.
• Teams always complete high-priority entries to ensure the value of the product or system being developed is maximized.

The product owner must keep an open mind and listen to what others in their team say to make changes as required. Agile is all about continuous improvement, which means that your product backlog is always evolving. It’s constantly changing, growing, and evolving as you plan and build. Agile Product Backlog Grooming, also known as product backlog refinement, is an activity that helps you to improve your product backlog continuously.

The planning for Product Backlog Refinement sessions should be the responsibility of this core product discovery team. This way the Product Backlog Refinement session will proceed in an organized and planned manner. Items prioritization serves as direction to the team and supports sprint planning.

Who should be in Backlog Grooming Meeting?

Nothing gets done unless it’s on the backlog, but simply listing an item doesn’t guarantee that it will be accomplished. Product backlog refinement is the process of selecting which tasks are the most relevant to work on next – so you’re only working on what matters. As a general rule, the development team should expect to spend up to 10% of its time each sprint assisting with grooming activities. Easy Agile TeamRhythm transform your flat product backlog, prioritizing based on value to the customer and bringing the customer journey to life. They help teams organize and prioritize user stories while visualizing the customer journey. Keeping your customers embedded in your process will help you make refinement decisions that are in the best interest of the customer, no matter what phase of development you’re in.

Backlog grooming is the process that ensures the product backlog is ready for the team to work on. We have worked with hundreds of companies and helped refine their product backlogs in product management. Whether you are a start-up or an enterprise, get in touch with us for a free consultation and see how you can benefit from our product development services. It may take some testing before you decide the best backlog item qualities to monitor; you don’t necessarily have to use the ones envisioned by scrum rulebooks.

You can also use the graphic to exhibit other details of the concept in a meaningful and easy-to-understand manner while giving your presentations a creative makeover. When every single task is included in the product backlog and is kept up to date, development teams can use them as an efficient basis for iteration planning. Not being on the same page about the description or acceptance criteria of user stories can lead developers to implement half-baked stories or stories that lead to unexpected results. In situations like that, during review, the product owner would provide more clarification and send the user story back to the developer to revise and implement it as expected. It’s not hard to see how this back-and-forth might delay the delivery of the feature.

DEEP-ening the Product Backlog

We hope the backlog refinement tips shared in this blog helped you answer that question. Some tasks cannot begin until another dependent task is completed. These dependencies can halt team members and delay progress if not identified or managed. deep backlog Make sure to identify any dependencies when backlog grooming. Estimated- Backlog items should be “estimated” to understand the work, time, and cost required to implement. Backlog items at the top should comprise a precise estimation.

The high priority items in the Product Backlog are fine grained and have more details as well as accurate estimates because of more information and greater details of those items. Items on the lower priority are big items with high level estimates. As the team gets more detailed information on lower priority items, these items are further split in to small items. The Development Team is responsible for the estimates of the items in the Product Backlog. One-click reporting goes deeper into the data and helps the product owner make insightful decisions. Reports on time, tasks and more can all be filtered to show only what you want to see.

As noted, you may prefer a more technical way of describing your backlog items instead of using user stories and epics. The backlog should be groomed regularly by organizing, prioritizing, and removing items. A well-attended backlog keeps product teams agile by challenging feature importance and keeping everyone’s priorities in sync. Sometimes, however, our https://globalcloudteam.com/ teams are not interchangeable—they have more specialized skills and knowledge. In these cases, we need team-specific views into the backlog, so that teams see and choose from only the features that are relevant to their skillsets. This works, but has the unfortunate side effect of having some teams work on much lower priority features than other teams.

Learn how agile release planning can help you with your software development and agile project plan. Prioritize– The product backlog should be ordered from high to low, from the most valuable items at its top to the least valuable at its bottom. It’s fully aligned with your company’s strategic goals and business value for current and future stakeholders. The most important thing about identifying a Product Backlog Grooming facilitator is ensuring they have the right skills and experience to perform the role at hand.

Advantages of User Stories over Requirements and Use Cases

Sprint planning is a scrum event conducted by the scrum master to set a sprint plan and goal for the upcoming sprint. 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 product backlog is a prioritized and ordered list that represents the work to be completed by a development team. Backlog items are derived from the product roadmap and are organized based on the tasks that are most vital — the ones that will make the biggest impact at any given time.

Backlog refinement isn’t a luxury task reserved for when you get a chance to tidy up. Refinement is a key part of product backlog management that ensures a backlog always has the most recent, up-to-date information. A product backlog represents all of the goals and desired outcomes within the development of a product. They are the specific tasks a team hopes to complete when they set out to design or improve upon a product. We may not be wrong to say that product professionals create backlogs that are estimated and prioritized in most cases. The criteria that are more likely to not be given enough attention are the first and the third .

Which and How Many Product Backlogs?

We may make clearer how such backlogs can hurt our ability to deliver a winning product. It’s best to put aside an excessively detailed product backlog handed down to us and develop a fresh one from the roadmap based on the DEEP principles. This attribute of an excellent product backlog is especially critical in Agile.

The backlog refinement meeting is essential to any successful product backlog refinement process. It is the product owner who takes the lead in the meeting and while the discussion can often be lengthy it should never go beyond gaining more knowledge on the topic. These discussions should be documented for future use in other backlog grooming sessions. Before a sprint, the scrum team meets and discusses backlog refinement, which is why it’s often referred to as a backlog refinement meeting.

A backlog is a prioritized list of tasks for the team to work on. The backlog might consist of product bugs, new features, technical debt, UI changes, etc. At the appropriate time, each product backlog should have a size estimate that corresponds to the effort required to develop that item. The product owner uses these estimates to help determine a product backlog item’s priority.

What is DEEP in Product Backlog?

Every backlog item is graded based on its business value and fit with the company’s strategic goals. Nothing gets developed until it is in the queue, but having something on the backlog does not mean it will be done. The backlog refining product process guarantees that only the most important tasks of your teams are scheduled for completion in the next sprint. Grooming the backlog on a constant schedule makes it doable, enabling teammates to prune user stories and create a rational list of bite-sized pieces to work on.

One key determinant is whether the team needs to be able to forecast beyond the standard 2-3 Sprint window. For new teams, that may not matter, while for other teams management may be expecting some measure of predictability – perhaps 6 months or more. Removing items that are no longer relevant to the product. This mnemonic helps us remember the qualities of a healthy backlog.

Maintaining the product backlog is the primary responsibility of the product owner or product manager. Part of that process involves refining details and estimates and prioritizing items. Keeping the product team updated is another purpose of backlog refinement. Without clarity in the backlog, there can be miscommunication or bad product decisions, either of which is going to hurt the project. Using it, you can illustrate the solution for managing long product backlogs, i.e., DEEP – Detailed Appropriately, Estimated, Emergent, and Prioritized.

If this is not done, the item should be removed from the prioritized user stories list. Including a roadblock-addled item in a sprint would prevent the team from seeing the user story through to completion. The scrum master ensures that enough user stories are planned for the next sprint based on the sprint velocity, team members’ vacation plans, etc.