Grooming the Backlog

Also known as ‘backlog grooming’, backlog refinement is an ongoing or recurring event for the development team working in Agile. It helps us to be well-prepared for the next sprint. It is so important that it’s surprising how some teams somehow seem to regard it as an activity that they can afford to put off.  What’s the value in backlog refinement and what steps are crucial to help us make the most of it?

Why We Should Refine the Product Backlog

Let’s begin by quickly drawing attention to the importance of backlog grooming. While this might seem obvious to some, it is still worth drawing attention to for people who are readily disposed to overlooking it when limited by time.

Backlog grooming helps to ensure that our requirements are ready for the next sprint. It is ensuring the backlog is updated and well-ordered to guide the smooth execution of the team’s work. With it, we put ourselves in a better position to create a successful product and to lead more efficient spring planning sessions.

Steps to Refining the Product Backlog Successfully

Backlog grooming should be done regularly and involves a few steps:

Collect data

After shipping a release, we should collect customer and user feedback. What do customers and users think of what we shipped? What did we get right and what can we do better, according to customers? We need to find all these out before continuing with our backlog refinement.

Study the data

Having collected customer and user feedback, we proceed to analyze the information that we have. What features would be useful to users that we have yet to provide? We should seek to find out whether we’re pushing out the right features.

Apply the insights

The next step after drawing our conclusions from the data we have is to incorporate the insights gained, back into our backlog. This means making necessary modifications to items we have in the list. We may add new items and remove those that are no longer relevant.

Work out the next sprint

Finally, based on the latest insights on hand, we have to determine what we are going to do next. What will be our sprint goal? It is important to determine what functionality or features we’re going to make available or enhance next. What assumptions do we wish to validate? We need to decide this.

Fine-tune the items in the backlog

The next step we want to take in the refinement process is to refine the product backlog items. To make it easier to achieve our sprint goal, we need to divide larger items into smaller ones. This means, for instance, splitting epics into user stories. We should make items to work on next high-priority and arrange them in the order of importance for attaining our sprint goal.

As Roman Richler suggests, we may also have the development team provide estimates for epics (and user stories) that have just been added or modified. This helps us to have a clearer idea of the amount of work that will be required.

Getting Items Ready

We should take steps to ensure that items for the next sprint are ready. We have to be sure that the user stories we’d be focusing on next are clear and practicable. This means ensuring that the team can easily get into action immediately the sprint starts.  This may involve creating a design sketch and identifying operational constraints. It may also entail sorting out possible dependencies between teams.

Grooming is Collaborative

The product owner may update the backlog at any time at their discretion. It is generally best practice to have a regular backlog grooming however and invite the cross-functional leads to participate.  This will provide crucial insights into any gaps in your requirements, allow for scoring before you get to planning, and provide visibility to your XFN partners, so they are aware of upcoming work.

Making the process of refining the backlog collaborative helps us to deal with a product owner’s biases. It gives us a chance to make the most of the knowledge and expertise of team members to reduce risks. It enables us to better understand the items in the backlog and makes why certain changes are necessary clear to all.

The product owner can also reduce their workload when refinement is made teamwork. This arguably improves our chances of generating better requirements and delivering a winning product.