ForeFront Agile Series

Essential Tips for Backlog Grooming: Part 1

At ForeFront, the agile movement is not just a best practice, it’s a vital part our DRIVEN culture. This is the first of many posts of our Agile blog series, which is designed to provide insight on agile best practices and methods on how to keep your company at the forefront.

The Agile Scrum – process, method, practice, whatever you’d like to call it – establishes rituals for the Product Owner (PO) and team to observe. These exercises are meant to facilitate the prioritization, refinement, collaboration, and initial estimation of Stories in the backlog desired for upcoming sprints. In part 1 of this blog, we’ll be providing you with some helpful tips on how to hold an effective backlog grooming session.

First, let’s get down the basics. When it comes to backlog grooming, we’ve broken down the process into 3 areas:

• Inputs – PO brings the Content and Priority of the selected Story.
• Collaboration – Refine/Add/Expand on details of the Stories and Criteria.
• Outputs – Team provides rough/fine grained estimates (based on relative grain of the Story).

And without further a-do, here are our tips for a successful backlog grooming session.

Tip #1: Treat the Backlog Grooming Session as if it Were Part of Project-Level Sprint Planning

Think about the following steps when you approach your grooming session:

• Define your success criteria.
• Talk about “what” will be delivered in the upcoming sprint.
• The PO selects and presents the Stories.
• The team asks for any clarifications. This is where discussion and Q&A happen – a good place to identify dependencies/blockers.
• The PO adds relevant info resulting in the Story/Criteria.
• Team gives an estimate (if possible). Rather than in hours or points, consider using T-Shirt size (small, medium, large, etc.) as a rough order of magnitude.
• The PO then might indicate that priorities will change based on the estimate. Great! That’s the kind of collaboration that’s supposed to occur!

Tip #2: No Backlog Grooming in the First or Last 20% Rule

Try not to schedule backlog grooming sessions during the first or last 20% of the Sprint. During the first few days of the Sprint, the team is just getting started on this Sprint’s work. On the contrary, during the last few of the Sprint, the team is often working hard to get closure on the current Sprint items. To guarantee the team is focused on the quality of the product backlog, you want to make sure that they are focused on the session and not the current Sprint. Therefore, that middle part of the Sprint is a good time to do backlog grooming!

Tip #3:  Establish a Shared Understanding of Backlog Items

Consider the minimum attributes of a Story before considering it for backlog grooming. Is the team enabled to provide a “rough estimate” (T-Shirt size) given a “rough idea”? Do they need a User Story statement? What about acceptance criteria to be estimated? The team and PO should agree on the typical minimum, but recognize exceptions/deviations that impact (+/-) the velocity or quality of delivery.

Tip #4: Consider Doing Some Informal Backlog Grooming Prior to the Session

The POs are the team members and/or stakeholders that refine stories and establish their order in the backlog. This kind of activity may be a daily occurrence for the PO. Development team members should feel free to discuss relative sizes with the PO, but wait to record any estimate until the entire team has estimated the item first. In other words, the early collaborators should try to avoid skewing or anchoring the entire Team’s estimates.

Tip #5: Teams Should Review the Stories At Least 24 Hours Prior to the Grooming Session

If your Stories are documented in any way before a backlog grooming session (such as on JIRA, a wiki or on index cards), send a reminder to the development team to review before the grooming session. This preparation will ensure they can speak intelligently about them. If the PO is making lots of last minute edits right up until the refinement session, a lot of the information will be seen for the first time in the meeting. Last minute edits have the potential to make the meeting last longer and cause confusion. Ideally, the PO should target their editing efforts at being ready 24 hours prior to the backlog grooming session.

That’s a wrap for part 1 of our blog on backlog grooming. Be on the lookout next week for part 2!