No products in the cart.
Mục Lục
In the absence of explicit efforts aimed at managing this inflation, this inflation would result in the too well known pathologies of schedule and budget overruns. For product development teams using the Agile project management methodology, Agile backlog grooming is a critical process that should be performed regularly for maximum impact. Doing so helps your team go into sprint planning sessions fully equipped to be productive. Backlog grooming meetings may also be helpful at the end of the sprint, mid-sprint or on an ad-hoc basis when your team needs to regroup. In backlog management, team members prioritize tasks that deliver the most user value. Then, those priority tasks are updated with details so team members can understand what they need to do to complete the tasks involved in the item’s development.
Product owners may find it helpful to receive updates about changes that the owner or client wants to make before the official backlog session to prepare their questions. Backlog grooming, also known as backlog refinement or backlog management, is an effective project management technique. The process involves reviewing accumulated work that’s incomplete to prioritize important tasks.
Inform sprint planning with data
However, if the product team is very large and consists of sub-teams, it may be necessary only for representatives of each group to attend the meeting. Backlog refinement improves Sprint planning productivity and improves work velocity. Likewise, it’s also a good idea to try and limit the number of people attending your meetings. This will help you keep the meeting focused, as too many people speaking and giving input can muddy up the roadmap and distract from the larger issues. Your backlog is a great source of information for your team, and it can easily help you communicate product strategy and next steps to everyone if you use it right. It’s also a great way to help gather feedback from your team to get additional opinions and points-of-view that you may not have gotten otherwise.
Involve the right people in your backlog grooming session so that every decision made is transparent and understood. In other words, backlog grooming is a lot like housekeeping; teams get rid of irrelevant items, add new ones, and update existing items with the latest information. During sprint planning, it’s easy to move stories in and out of the sprint as the team creates its sprint forecast. Just right-click on an issue to move it in or out of the sprint.
Groom your backlog a few days before the sprint ends
Johan Karlsson is an Agile coach and Senior Consultant who builds bridges between customers and product teams. With an engineering and development background, he is responsible for Hansoft’s international customer base and Helix Swarm. He’s a backlog nerd with the ambitious goal to bring Agile and lean principles into modern enterprise environments. Have a solid of what you want to achieve and make sure everyone is aware of it. Make sure everyone on the team understands how they can contribute to the goals, so you get the most out of your meeting. Include sufficient details in the backlog items to ensure that team members understand the steps to complete the assignments.
So to keep the team on track for an MVP release, it’s best to focus on grooming epics. Before the meeting, you should know what’s in the backlog and the context behind the most relevant items. You won’t have time during the meeting to discuss every item, so focus on something specific, such as the grooming of buckets (e.g. tech debt bucket). Another way to help prioritize items is to categorize them into groups like user stories, bugs, feature requests, user insights, etc.
Identify roadblocks and minimize risks associated with backlog items
It’s also helpful to have task lists structured on boards — like Teamwork’s Board View. This way, it’s easier to get a top-down view of task lists so that teams can spot where to refine things to create a better workflow. Tasks should be prioritized to reflect the order in which they should be completed and which offers the most customer or user value. Large user stories are split into smaller ones that can be addressed on a per-sprint basis and then reorganize points to reflect each work chunk’s complexity and effort. It’s easy to spend too little or too much time grooming the product backlog. In some cases, it might also be necessary to resolve dependencies between various teams working on the same project to ensure that there’s nothing that could hold up development.
- To set the priority, one must have a deep understanding of the market as well as the cost to implement each item.
- Teams that respond quickly to culture and development concerns are happier, more productive, and write better code.
- It’s important that data such as deliverable specs, due date, instructions, and requirements are stated properly for each item.
- A well organized and categorized backlog will makes the jobs of both the product owner and engineering team infinitely easier for upcoming sprints.
- Estimate items by discussing the weight of the work with all team members.
A successful backlog refinement session needs the participation of the key stakeholder representatives, the Scrum Master or a Project Manager, and the developers who build and test the product. Adding and removing product backlog management techniques user stories or features is probably the most well-known part of backlog grooming. This is where you look at everything on your backlog and decide what is dead weight and what gaps need to be filled.
Backlog Grooming
Items in the backlog have priorities that show their importance to the project and the customer. Teams can deliver high-quality customer service by completing the highest priority and most valuable backlog items as quickly as possible. You should be left with backlog tasks that are clear and actionable. These are usually backlog items that have been already broken down into small chunks of work. The aim here is to have a small number of user stories ready for the first grooming session. In this article, you’ll learn what backlog grooming is, why it’s so important to your team, and how to effectively groom your backlog.
Backlog grooming sessions are also good times to look closely at user stories and discuss with the team anything that isn’t clear or needs to be updated with important contextual information. Backlog grooming meetings prepare for long-term future projects. In contrast, a sprint planning meeting focuses on only one short-term work item.
Right Folks, Right Time
Having a great feedback management system is one of the best ways to get the most out of your customer feedback. When figuring out what items in your backlog to prioritize, knowing what your customers want is essential. Thinking about these questions can help you figure out what to keep or add to your backlog. Designed for colocated teams, the backlog refinement meeting can also work for distributed teams using tools like Planning Poker for JIRA and Hatjitsu.
Then, the backlog items must be prioritized in a way that meets those goals. It’s important that your backlog is transparent and accessible for the development team and stakeholders. A good way to do that is to put it in a visible place near the team on a wall or a whiteboard.
How to run a successful backlog grooming session: Tips and best practices
The facilitator, which is usually your product manager or project manager will dedicate the time and attention required for each piece of the puzzle. Although you could spend hours discussing backlog items, we’d suggest capping https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ your refinement meeting at 1 hour. Using this time frame is going to motivate you and the development teams to stay focused and keep the conversation on track. This question depends on if you run an agile or scrum methodology.
