Backlog Grooming¶

Definition: Grooming (or refinement) is a meeting of the Scrum team in which the product backlog items are discussed and the next sprint planning is prepared.

Keeping the backlog healthy

Once the product backlog is built, it's important to regularly maintain it to keep pace with the program. Product owners should review the backlog before each sprint planning meeting to ensure prioritization is correct and feedback from the last sprint has been incorporated. Regular review of the backlog is often called "backlog grooming" in agile circles.

Once the backlog gets larger, product owners need to group the backlog into near-term and long-term items. Near-term items need to be fully fleshed out before they are labeled as such. This means complete user stories have been drawn up, collaboration with design and development has been sorted out, and estimates from development have been made. Longer term items can remain a bit vague, though it's a good idea to get a rough estimate from the development team to help prioritize them. The key word here is "rough": estimates will change once the team fully understands and begins work on those longer term items.

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. Once work is in progress and a user story is added to a sprint, though, keep changes to a minimum as they disrupt the development team and affect focus, flow, and morale.

Rules:

1. The product owner and team representatives arrange it in the mid-sprint time. In this case, planning and refinement meetings alternate but happen on the same day each week. That provides an effective rhythm for the entire team.

1. The grooming involves splitting big items into smaller ones, rewriting backlog items to be more expressive, ensuring User Stories have parent features, deleting obsolete or no more need items, and so on.

1. The product owner and management team must estimate the velocity of the Sprint (how much can and should be accomplished within the time box) based on team schedules and capacity. By creating this estimate at the beginning of each Sprint rather than universally during the design stage, they can take advantage of valuable insights coming out of the previous Sprint’s retrospective and review meetings. Ultimately, creating a new Sprint velocity that accomplishes the necessary objectives efficiently with the resources on hand.

Advantages of Product Backlog Refinement

• Removing uncertainty and unknown facts of user stories increase the product’s efficiency.
• Backlog grooming identifies the dependencies within the team and helps to foresee risks.
• Permanent grooming meetings save time for the development team for further discussion during the sprint cycle because they give clarity to developers and testers about the requirements.
• Successful grooming leads to effective sprint planning.
• The grooming process gives product owners, managers, or business analysts more chances to enhance the requirements with more information if it’s required.