The Engineer’s Complete Guide To Backlog Grooming

During the session, they work on the backlog items at the top of the product backlog, and make them ready for the work to start in sprints. Below I am going to show you exactly how to shorten your backlog refinement sessions, while getting more out of them. And you will learn how a Kanban board https://globalcloudteam.com/ can help you meet your goals and drive teams forward. 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.

These discussions should be documented for future use in other backlog grooming sessions. 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. This question depends on if you run an agile or scrum methodology.

Crowdsource customer feedback in one easy to use tool and build better products. Having a great feedback management system is one of the best ways to get the most out of your customer feedback. When figuring out what items in your backlog to prioritize, knowing what your customers want is essential. Backlog management and grooming sessions are regular parts of the project management cycle, and often come at the end of a Scrum iteration or sprint. They are an essential step in figuring out what your product team’s next steps are and how best to tackle them.

Keeping The Backlog Healthy

Listening during the refinement process is possibly the most important tip we can give you for improving your backlog grooming sessions. Your development team and other teams working on your product will have unique points-of-view that you might not have considered, and this can help you make better, more objective choices. Regularly The concept of Product Backlog Refinement grooming your backlog is the best way to keep your product backlog clean and boost workflow in the process. For many product teams, the features that end up on your backlog are a result of input from many different sources—e.g. Stakeholders, customers, and higher-ups—which often means item can overlap or conflict with each other.

Then, you decide the amount of effort necessary to implement, as well as the order to do it. Product backlog grooming is not yet an official Scrum meeting. If we make that person attend another meeting, we could risk the delivery of whatever product backlog item the person is working on. A good rule of thumb is that about 5 to 10 percent of the effort in each sprint should be spent on backlog grooming.

How Do Product Backlogs Keep The Team Agile?

Or take a glance at the actual items up for discussion to get a head start. With good preparation, you can cut down the hour those five items would have taken to complete – to 30 minutes. Use some time in your Retro to evaluate how you can improve your Refinement sessions so that the team can get to have two sprints’ worth of estimated stories in their backlog. Big architectural and/or UI/UX decisions should be made at the feature level well in advance of a Refinement session.

Review the backlog to identify if there are any issues that could break down into smaller tasks or be removed from your backlog altogether. Build the ultimate successful product development organization. The Kanban board is the best tool to achieve visibility and discipline by making the status and progress of the preparation work visible. Yes, the Product Owner is an expert on the product and customer needs. That doesn’t mean they are the best expert on everything. Other team members might have more knowledge and different, valuable viewpoints on the problem.

Our Best Practices For Backlog Grooming Meetings

The product owner then organizes each of the user stories into a single list for the development team. The product owner may choose to deliver a complete epic first . Or, it may be more important to the program to test booking a discounted flight which requires stories from several epics . 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.

Instead of making things more clear, a too quick glance at a complex item might even add to the team’s level of stress. Whoever is presenting stories in Refinement should be the person who can make a decision about them. If a question needs to be escalated for a decision, it’s that person who needs to be in the room.

• First, it makes sure you’re close enough to the end of the sprint that you’ll have a good sense of what will be accomplished without having to interrupt your workflow between sprints.
• This gives the product owner sufficient time to act on any issues that are identified.
• Move faster, set clear goals, and connect more effectively with your team.
• Visibility on key issues makes backlog grooming way easier and faster.
• Let’s say your team wants to cover five work items in an hour.

Having a shared screen and a planning board is much more effective as no one needs to take notes later. Too easy to start talking about videos on YouTube or what everyone’s having for lunch. Keep it short, ideally an hour at most, every couple of weeks.

Typically, the product manager or the product owner would run and lead a backlog grooming meeting agenda and ensure they are executed successfully. ProjectManager is cloud-based work management for hybrid teams that are collaborative to the core and provides a single source of truth that keeps everyone on the product team on the same page. Real-time data helps you make more insightful decisions when in a backlog refinement meeting, which leads to more successful sprints. The product owner is responsible for building the right product. Development team members are responsible for executing the item correctly.

Review the product back and make sure no work items have sat there longer than necessary so every item is of value. By asking these questions earlier, the product owner is given a chance to arrive at answers to any questions he or she may not be prepared to answer immediately. Often, Scrum Teams come together once per Sprint, or once per week to have their “Refinement Meeting”. The Product Owner shares what Product Backlog items need to be refined and the whole team discusses them. Needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. Article 6 Reasons to Start Managing Technical Debt in 2021 Setting your 2021 business goals?

The purpose of backlog refinement is to have a product backlog ready for the next sprint. This is done by the scrum team having a chance to ask questions of the product owner. Since kanban boards traditionally don’t have backlog functionality, product managers, development managers, and team leads use issues in the first column to plan. This combination of the backlog screen from scrum and the kanban board into one agile board functions like a scrum board backlog. Finally, a core part of sprint backlog grooming meetings is splitting user stories and larger features up.

Browse By Team Type

Are some things higher priority but too large to tackle in your next iteration? See if you can break down that item into smaller pieces so you can get the highest priority piece done first. The more prepared you are for backlog refinement meetings, the shorter they are.

By having a shared resource for everyone to access and easily figure out what needs to be done next helps keep everyone on the same page and builds momentum going forward. Import and export tasks in the backlog refinement template. Once you update the backlog, you can send it back to Jira with the refined updates. Your product team needs to agree on a standardized measure to assess the effort involved in each user story. This process drives your team forward and helps them get more out of backlog refinement.

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. 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. Monday has fully customisable backlog templates to organise, manage, and prioritise items in one central space. Chairing the meeting to ensure that the agenda is on track and that the meeting moves forward instead of getting caught up dissecting a particular backlog item. It’s not just about reporting what the dev team is working on, but an opportunity to get customer feedback .

During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner describes the highest priority features to the team. Collecting user feedback to analyze and make informed decisions based of off can help you improve customer satisfaction and create a better product in the process. Our all-in-one customer feedback management platform helps you collect user feedback from around the internet so you can make better-informed choices about your product. Sometimes, you’ll have backlog items or user stories that you can’t work on until other items are completed. Identifying and anticipating these dependencies can get rid of potential blockers and boost your workflow in the process.

Backlog Refinement: How To Effectively Estimate 12+ Stories Per Hour

This allows a couple of sprints to write stores with clear requirements, and present them to the scrum team at least one sprint ahead of when the work will be started. Every project view feeds automatically into the live dashboard, which doesn’t require any time-consuming setup as you’ll find in other software. The real-time dashboard captures data and automatically calculates the information to display it in easy-to-read graphs and charts. The product owner can view six project metrics whenever they want to monitor the sprint and remove any roadblocks they find. Kanban boards are the preferred tool when managing a backlog, but that can be done on a task list, too.

The Top Feedback Management Tools And What To Look For

Here are 6 reasons why managing technical debt should be part of your plan. Kanban boards can also be filtered by people, due date, progress, priority tags etc. It’s worth adding; you probably have the tools you need already — no one wants another single task tool that integrates poorly. The product person will be chairing the meeting, and it’s hard to do this and take notes, so someone should help document.

You might have several similar requests which can be bundled together, or several items that diametrically oppose each other. You might even have old requests you’ve already dealt with and forget to delete. Through all of this mess, some features can fall through the cracks and get lost. Backlog grooming is a key part of sprint planning and the product management process in general. But there are many ways you can optimize these backlog grooming sessions that you may not know about. While there is no required length of time for backlog refinement meetings, aim for around 45 minutes to an hour.

Once work is in progress, though, keep changes to a minimum as they disrupt the development team and affect focus, flow, and morale. While the product owner is tasked with prioritizing the backlog, it’s not done in a vacuum. Effective product owners seek input and feedback from customers, designers, and the development team to optimize everyone’s workload and the product delivery. You want your product backlog stacked with relevant user stories that are well-documented and prioritized correctly so that they’re of value to your customer and company. Remember, only those items in the backlog will be built but just because it’s on the backlog doesn’t mean it should be executed. One of the biggest reasons for having product backlog refinement is that it keeps your backlog clean.