Refinements are a core part to successfully aligning teams around what work is involved in building the product and gives them a platform to discuss how they might go about technically implementing solutions. Not only is it a meeting for the team to align around the 'what', 'why' and the 'how'... it also involves a common shared understanding around roles to maximise value and quality in the end result.
"Product Backlog refinement is the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog."
In this post we'll talk through some of the things that are best practices to help teams refine their backlog successfully.
Roles and Responsibilities for Refinement
Product Owner As a Product Owner, your role in refinement begins with having a vision for what the product is. This could be in the shape and form of a sprint goal or relaying the 'why' to the team and making sure you are transparent about the vision and how it links back into your over-arching product goals. Here are a few examples of activities that Product Owners can initiate during refinement: - Creating and relaying the product vision. - Setting the Sprint goals for the team to achieve. - Relaying the expectations and direction for each requirement. - Answering questions from the team to help them with their understanding. - Checking in to make sure the team are clear on the 'what' and the 'why'. Development Team As a member of the Development Team, your role in refinement starts with asking questions to better understand the 'what' and they 'why' and helping your team to gain a better understanding too. Once the team are aligned around the vision, I would then encourage teams to start thinking about 'how' they might go about carrying out the technical implementation and solution. Here are a few examples of activities that the Development Team can carry out during refinement: - Create a shared understanding around the product vision as a team. - Discuss how they might go about achieving the sprint goal and what tickets they will need. - Discuss the technical implementations and solutions for each piece of work. - Discussing any experiments they would like to carry out to test and validate the hypothesis. - Focusing on simplification and breaking down larger stories into small digestible chunks. - Assign a scribe to capture the information from discussions within the tickets. - Checking refined tickets against the teams Definition of Ready. Scrum Master As a Scrum Master, you can help the team to understand the parts they play during refinement and some of the common pit-falls where most teams struggle. Your roles is to help the team to achieve their goals during the session and helping the outcomes to be effective and valuable for the team. Below are a few examples of activities that the Scrum Master can carry out to help the session run smoothly.
- Encourage teams to start thinking about what they'd like to refine ahead of the session.
- Coaching and supporting product owners in crafting their vision and Sprint goals.
- Help the team to develop a structure for refining and capturing information prior to the session.
- Creating a shared understanding across the team by asking team members to summarise their discussions and encouraging them to reflect it in the ticket.
- Using the I.N.V.E.S.T framework to breakdown dependancies, risks and blockers.
- Encouraging teams to break down larger tickets to simplify.
- Encouraging team members to hold themselves accountable towards their 'Definitions of Ready'.
- Helping to time keep, so that the team can spend approximately 5mins discussing each ticket.
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