If you’re a product owner, product manager, or business analyst you no doubt know that you need to manage your team’s product backlog.
Yet it’s likely that depending on who you ask there could be different views of what exactly that means, who all is involved in carrying it out, and even the specific name you use to refer to that activity.
For the longest time backlog refinement was known as backlog grooming, however that term has gone out of favor due to other uses of the term “grooming”.
Here’s a collection of resources to help you figure out how you should approach backlog refinement.
Backlog Refinement: “Writing Stories” isn’t the whole story
If your team is (or claims to be) using an agile approach you’ve probably been asked to lead, or at least play a key role in, backlog refinement.
That’s great.. What does that mean?
(C’mon, you know the question has crossed your mind. It’s ok.)
Backlog refinement is the often misunderstood activity in agile approaches that business analysts are uniquely qualified to excel at.
As long as you understand what it’s intended to accomplish.
Hint: “writing stories” isn’t it.
Join Kent McDonald, freelance product manager and recovering agile coach, to find out how to up your backlog refinement game and be the person everyone wants on their team.
In this session you’ll learn how to
- Maintain a manageable backlog
- Keep your team focused on the right things to build
- Make sure your team has the information they need to build that right thing.
As an attendee of this session, you’ll learn that this format isn’t necessary so that you can focus on the things that are truly helpful.
Agile Alliance Glossary entry on Backlog Refinement
Backlog refinement is when the product owner and some, or all, of the rest of the team review items on the backlog to ensure the backlog contains the appropriate items, that they are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery. This activity occurs on a regular basis and may be an officially scheduled meeting or an ongoing activity.It should be called backlog refinement, but people still refer to it as grooming
How To Refine Features
You can get a lot of value out of having big items on your backlog (ie features) because you can get a broad view of the overall output you might need to deliver without having to dive into detail on any one particular item too soon.
At some point, though you do need to dive into detail on something in order to start delivery. Feature refinement provides a way to do that in a way that allows you consider options and focus on the essential aspects of the feature and discard the aspects that aren’t completely necessary.
User Story Conversations
Folks in the Agile community have long suggested that user stories are placeholders for a conversation. That pronouncement may leave you with some questions, such as who should be included in those conversations, when do you have these conversations, what should you talk about, and how do you remember what you said?
Behavior Driven Development (BDD) provides a synthesis of techniques that helps to answer these questions. The core idea of BDD is your team should discuss the expected behavior of a product as you prepare to build a specific increment of it. It’s important to understand the specifics of those conversations.
21 Story Splitting Patterns
One aspect of backlog management is splitting your user stories down to a reasonably small size. Some teams like to get their stories to roughly the same size so they don’t have to worry about estimating.
Others teams want to get stories small enough that they can get them done in within a sprint.
Still other teams find splitting stories to be a great way to get a better understanding of those backlog items.
However your team views story splitting, there are 21 common patterns that teams use to split stories and still maintain the key characteristics of user stories. This listing of those story splitting patterns available in the KBPMedia Free Content Library (create a free membership to gain access) provides a great guide.grooming” in various parts of the world. You’re more likely to hear backlog refinement or backlog management.
An example of backlog refinement for an internal product
Inspired by a trip to Fan Fest and touring Zac Brown’s Southern Ground recording studio (long story) it occurred to me that recording music can be very similar to developing software products. The people who truly have a passion for both pursuits don’t get hung up on process, but use process to help get them to great outcomes, whether that be an artistically pure recording or a product that solves customer’s problems.
As a result of that realization, I shared how the team I was working with at the time performed backlog refinement. When I wrote this, it was a work in progress, which I think is perhaps one of the more important points.
The approach I described in this article changed as we progressed through the effort as experience helped us refine our approach.