Backlog Grooming: Benefits, Tools & Best Practices

This will ensure productive meetings that result in a workflow that addresses priority items in a logical order. When teams do it effectively, they keep the backlog in check and make projects proceed that much more efficiently. Let’s dive further into some additional benefits of backlog grooming meetings. Attendees should include the project manager, the customer point of contact and key individual development team members, if 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 product backlog management techniques that helps you to improve your product backlog continuously. Backlog refinement is a team event that helps with the Scrum process. The goal of refinement is to dig into the backlog and make sure the team has enough information to work on upcoming stories.

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Team members should be able to conveniently understand the forthcoming items within the backlog, meaning they should be sufficiently detailed. However, it’s equally important to keep your session simple. Bringing in too many people can cause the session to run off track.

They keep the whole product team updated and on the same page. This is especially true for teams working on related tasks or tasks that need to be completed in sequence. Backlog grooming is also called backlog management, refinement, pre-planning, or storytime, especially in agile and scrum processes.

When to run the refinement meeting

It’s wise to shift around priorities before the backlog grooming session rather than during it. However, some teams prefer to re-prioritize user stories in the backlog together so everyone can discuss why things are moving around. Everyone who attends a backlog grooming session should do some form of preparation ahead of time. This especially applies to product owners and product managers, whose failure to prepare can lead to frustratingly inefficient sessions. So you’ll want to keep your grooming sessions focused and short—45 minutes to 1 hour should be enough.

Your goal shouldn’t be to empty the backlog of all of its PBIs. Instead, the goal should be to refine the list and https://globalcloudteam.com/ keep the backlog filled with relevant PBIs. Description — what’s the primary purpose of the product backlog item.

Key steps of a refinement meeting

Finally, identify roadblocks relating to the backlog items. The primary goal of a backlog grooming session should be to leave with your next sprint planned and prioritised. Tasks in that sprint should be impactful and aligned with your organisation’s strategy.

As a bare minimum, try for three hours per sprint, less than five percent of the total working hours of a two-week sprint. For a product that is underway and is following good scrum practices, this should be enough to keep the team from starving for work. According to the Scrum Guide, backlog grooming is a scrum artifact. Adding an item to the backlog is a way to acknowledge its importance and ensure it gets completed during the sprint. You can prioritize them by various factors, including risk, cost-to-benefit considerations, and dependencies.

Backlog Grooming Best Practices You Need to Know

This review freshens the details in everyone’s minds and focuses the discussion. Article The Cost of Technical Debt How much does technical debt cost your company? Let’s look at what the research says about the real cost of technical debt. Attendees should leave with a solid grasp of the technical risks and how these are being managed in upcoming work. Outdated issues in the backlog are distracting and should be removed. Go through issues one by one, discussing the impact of each issue compared with the complexity and feasibility of resolving it.

It is easier to embed best practices in your agile teams when you have strong processes and clear oversight. Behind every efficient and effective agile team, there is a beautifully managed, refined backlog. Every item in the backlog is clear and defined, with a reasonable time estimate. There’s no need for the team to go hunting for more context or information as all the detail needed is right there, ready for someone to take the task and get to work. Further, they pick backlog items to groom, plan or construct. Teams use this technique to prioritize groups as per their level of importance.

Project Management

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.

• However, there are a few popular cadences that typically work well.
• Grooming your backlog at planned intervals, you keep the backlog aligned with the changing stakeholder priorities.
• Every decision during a grooming session can be made independently, but it shouldn’t be.
• If you do decide to set up a recurring, regular Backlog Grooming meeting, the Scrum Master or Project Lead might direct the meeting.
• Similarly, we prioritize functionality or tasks in software development because few functionalities are more important than others.
• It helps make sure that the team is completing the most important work, which improves both team motivation (“My work is important!”) and the long-term sustainability of the business.
• Once the team completes an item, remove it from the backlog.

It’s easy to transform a product backlog into a catch-all for ideas that never materialize. User stories without a clear purpose or definition make the product backlog harder to manage. De-prioritize user stories that you don’t plan to implement in the next 2-3 sprints. Eliminate user stories that add little or no value to the product.

Time for backlog refinement

This should be done before your next sprint planning session. The primary goal of backlog grooming, also known as backlog refinement, is to maintain an updated backlog and ensure all items are ready for the upcoming sprints. As a product owner, the backlog is your responsibility, so you might think that only you can do all of the backlog management activities.