As a product person, you no doubt know that one key interaction you have with your product team is managing your 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 management was known as backlog grooming, however that term has gone out of favor due to other uses of the term “grooming”.
In this issue I’m sharing some good resources on backlog refinement and some of the key techniques you’ll use while you’re doing it.
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.
Other 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 story splitting technique brief includes a listing of those 21 story splitting patterns.
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.