Best Practices of Backlog Refinement

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It has double the impact as it allows you to create an effective leadership model. Analyzing the feedback and data collected from target users and active customers is the first step in grooming. It has an intangible net benefit of gaining insight from other team members based on customer feedback. Depending on how your team is structured, many different stakeholders can add items to the backlog.

Groom your backlog a few days before the sprint ends

“Emergent” states that the backlog is dynamic and always moving from idea to completed work. “Prioritize” speaks to which item is most important and must be addressed before the others. These are on the top of the list, which moves down to the lowest priority last. The backlog is constantly https://globalcloudteam.com/ being added to, either by the product manager or, depending on your organization, QA testers, developers or other team members. Bugs, changing company policies, or stakeholder feedback are all emergent items that need to be added to the backlog to ensure a quality product.

The whole project team has a part to play in this practice, as everyone has different expertise to bring to the table. The Project Lead and the Delivery Team should be actively involved in refinement. The backlog should have highest priority items at the top, lowest priority items at the bottom. The team that’s constantly completing their highest priority, most valuable backlog items is the team that’s delivering the most value, fastest to customers. To set the priority, one must have a deep understanding of the market as well as the cost to implement each item. The process also helps you assess and highlight risks or blockers in your product/project management journey.

Who should attend a product backlog refinement session?

Regular refinement sessions are imperative for keeping the backlog from stalling. During these meetings, it’s important to listen to team members and remain open backlog refinement techniques to discussing any product-related issues. Respecting differences in opinion and using the diverse skills and competencies of everyone can be beneficial.

Maybe you’re a procrastinator that likes to wait until the last minute to get all the tasks lined up for the next sprint. Well, there are certainly benefits to regular backlog grooming, and some of those benefits are touched on below. One of the more basic backlog grooming maneuvers is to get rid of any user stories that no longer appear relevant. However, as some user stories drop off the backlog, others will become important to include.

A good, well-groomed backlog makes sure you stay on top of what needs to be done next. It also helps you keep your backlog relevant by getting rid of unnecessary and irrelevant tasks so the more relevant features can be easily prioritized instead. If your backlog is updated, your team will have a solid foundation for sprint planning. Backlog grooming and sprint planning are parts of an agile approach, but aren’t exactly the same. Sometimes, the most valuable iterations of the product are born out of these grooming sessions. Before the meeting about the backlog, create a short agenda that contains at least a list of stories or tickets needing discussion.

You’ll spend more time in Sprint planning just trying to understand which tasks need to be dealt with first, rather than creating your plan and cracking on with the work. A regular backlog grooming meeting is necessary when your product has multiple stakeholders. The session is often completed in preparation for an upcoming sprint. It’s best to schedule the meeting a few days prior to the next sprint, since the final days are often consumed completing work in the current sprint. Modern-day agile project management centers around continuous improvement and agility.

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. Johan Karlsson is an Agile coach and Senior Consultant who builds bridges between customers and product teams. With an engineering and development background, he is responsible for Hansoft’s international customer base and Helix Swarm. He’s a backlog nerd with the ambitious goal to bring Agile and lean principles into modern enterprise environments. The product backlog is a dynamic document of planned work that reflects real-time needs and priorities of the business. It should be a fast-flowing river where new ideas turn into completed work, not a swamp where idle ideas sit and slowly decay.

What is a project in project management?

Meanwhile, a marketing team’s backlog may consist of content-related tasks, campaign strategies, and creative deliverables. Product owners are typically the key stakeholders of a project. Their responsibilities include creating a vision for the project and communicating that vision to the team.

It often encompasses a project that spreads over multiple sprints. Having backlog grooming sessions regularly helps to make sure that the team prioritizes the right stories. This way, the team has a good grasp over the complete product backlog. In these backlog refinement sessions, the product owners or managers explain the purpose of the prioritized stories to the team.

During the project, new needs will come up, and in response, those new user stories will have to be added to the backlog. Implementing well-managed meetings will improve the overall speed and efficiency of the sprint planning meetings that follow, helping to boost commitment and product familiarity. Meetings can be an invaluable tool for developing a product roadmap — or they can unnecessarily interrupt workflow.

Talk to stakeholders

Read below to learn all about the process, and get some tips to help your team structure better, more productive meetings. Repeat work means more meetings, which, of course, defeats the purpose of this tip. So, be careful to only focus on near-future sprints in each meeting. Thinking about these questions can help you figure out what to keep or add to your backlog.

• Items that may be added or removed include features, bugs and technical work.
• This is the perfect time for the product manager and others involved in planning to prioritizeproduct backlog items to address the high-priority items first.
• To prioritize accurately, consider factors like ship value, urgency, business goals, stakeholders’ interests, and product/project strategy.
• Skipping this would mean spending long hours pulling issues from the backlog into your sprint backlog.
• This process gives everyone on the product team confidence and clarity about what’s coming up and what they need to do next.
• Trying to do all of this yourself while also focusing on stakeholders, long-term vision, and business value can be too overwhelming.

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Review Prioritized Issues with the Team

After your meeting, make sure prioritized backlog work is actionable by communicating the next steps and providing clarity to your team. First, send follow-up notes clarifying and documenting important decisions surrounding your backlog. Also, reach out to team members to answer questions that went unanswered during your meeting. Finally, arrange follow-up sessions to debate or infuse expertise into backlog items further as needed. Backlog grooming allows team members to set a firm foundation for efficient sprint planning going forward. More efficient spring planning means faster delivery of relevant product features that users need and will love.

Team efficiency and work velocity is increased.

These dependencies depend on team members, stakeholders, and industrial practices. The roadmap also provides context for you, your team, and all stakeholders; enables effective collaboration; and helps everyone stay coordinated. Sync up with your team and any other relevant counterparts or execs to get their feedback and adjust accordingly.

Such items include product features, technical work, bugs and user stories. The remaining items are prioritized in order of importance and based on customer value. Prioritized items are noted and discussed in detail so that team members can act on them readily. In this guide, we explore what backlog grooming is, including its key terms, what meetings look like and who should attend them. We then dive into the best practices and tools you can use to make the most of your backlog grooming process. Holding periodic backlog refinement sessions can help maintain control of a variety of projects.

When preplanning teams will remove those user stories and tasks that are outdated. They’ll also add new user stories that are necessary due to newly discovered insights from users. If there are large user stories, called epics, these are broken down into smaller ones. Teams will also reevaluate priorities and reorder user stories as needed. Backlog grooming is not a one-time activity, but one that is regularly revisited and can be scheduled as ongoing in a project, usually by the product owner, product manager and relevant stakeholders.

This helps to ensure that issues are seen and understood from multiple perspectives as you work on refining user stories. Try to invite only the people who are critical for helping in the grooming session. Sometimes you might be asked to add something to the backlog that sounds like a good idea, but doesn’t really fit right now.

Make backlog grooming meetings fun

It’s an acronym that helps structure backlog management to ensure a consistent, easy-to-understand format. When deadlines or metrics change, new initiatives emerge, or clients‘ needs change, the sprint backlog offers a place to document all of these changes. Since it’s a repository for all work that needs to be completed, it makes sense to put these kinds of updates in the backlog so that the entire team stays up to date. It’s also helpful to have task lists structured on boards — like Teamwork’s Board View. This way, it’s easier to get a top-down view of task lists so that teams can spot where to refine things to create a better workflow. Task lists have a habit of getting out of hand as more and more items get added to them.

Because your backlog is receiving input from a lot of different people and sometimes from different departments, it’s super important to keep it as clean as possible. Another major purpose of backlog refinement is to keep the backlog populated with initiatives that are relevant. Any other team members that may have valuable user insights related to the backlog will add value to the meeting with their attendance, as well. Team members from the quality assurance team, customer support or technical support should all be considered when sending out an invite.