There is a very well-known graphic that shows the misalignment between customer requirements and the final delivery. Product Backlog refinement is a process that enables agile teams to narrow this gap by facilitating conversations around the unknowns internally with the team as well as externally with the customer.
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What Is Product Backlog Refinement?
The objective of the product backlog refinement is to have the product backlog items or user stories ready for development. Being ready for development implies that developers have sufficient details about what they need to develop. In addition, a well-refined story or PBI will also help developers understand how they can develop it.
The refinement process can be divided into five significant activities;
1. Reviewing: The team reviews each item in the product backlog and ensures it is clear, accurate, and up-to-date. The process could also result in getting more stories added to the backlog. This activity’s output identifies the areas where the team needs further clarity.
2. Clarifying: The team ensures that all the items have well-defined scope and acceptance criteria. They may identify the dependencies. This activity also entails discussing the stories with stakeholders to ensure correct understanding and may result in refining the stories to make them more actionable. The understanding may also result in the team removing or combining redundant or unnecessary stories
4. Prioritizing: The team then determines the priority levels for each item based on its value or importance relative to other items in the product backlog. There are many prioritization techniques that the team can use. The output of this activity is the ordered product backlog.
5. Estimating: The teams estimate the value using story point estimation techniques for each user story. The estimation will form the basis for sprint planning.
When To Do Product Backlog Refinement?
There are primarily two strategies that teams adopt to perform product backlog refinement.
Conduct separate sessions for refinement
Many teams prefer to host a separate session where all the team members go through the stories together. They hold the discussions and together determine which stories are clear and which are not, what clarifications need to be sought, and assign story points to them.
Advantages of focused refinement sessions
1. The team is wholly focused on the refinement without any other distractions
2. collaborative brainstorming may improve the quality of discussions, ideas, and outcomes
3. Different points of view may uncover complexities and challenges that may otherwise go undetected.
Continuous refinement
The other approach is when team members go about the refinement when they find time along with their regular work. The refinement is carried out iteratively and incrementally in such cases. As individual team members go about refining stories, they provide their inputs, questions, and estimates. Then, when they come to that story, other team members provide additional inputs, add their questions, may even answer the questions raised by earlier team members, and provide their estimates.
The process then gets concluded during the sprint planning or even before that. For example, if the product owner finds all required inputs available, they may seek required clarifications and prioritize stories before the sprint planning. Otherwise, the first agenda during the sprint planning is to ensure clarification and finalize the estimates before selecting the stories for that sprint.
Advantages of continuous refinement
1. There is no separate meeting required. Team members can provide input when it is convenient for them as part of this ongoing activity.
2. The ongoing process may facilitate better outcomes by allowing team members to give more thought to each story rather than being restricted by time.
3. This approach works best with teams that are not collocated or work in different time zones.
Who is responsible for the refinement?
The backlog refinement is a team responsibility. While the product owner maintains the backlog, the entire team is responsible for delivering the work. In addition, a refined product backlog clarifies the development team, resulting in better customer outcomes. Hence, the entire Scrum team should own the responsibility for refinement.
Best Practices For Product Backlog Refinement
1. Keep the backlog in an always-ready state.
Whatever strategy you use for backlog refinement, whether you have a separate session or allow for continuous refinement, you should ensure that the product backlog is always ready. The ready state implies that all the user stories and product backlog items are defined in a way that enables the team and other stakeholders to understand the requirement. It should be reasonably detailed, with acceptance criteria defined to the extent possible. Such readiness allows the team to review the backlog when they have time.
2. Have clear acceptance criteria for each backlog item and user story.
The acceptance criteria should be clear and allow the developers to understand the complexities and effort required to meet the exact requirements.
3. Keep backlog transparent and always available.
In addition to keeping the backlog in a ready state, it should always be available to the team and all other stakeholders.
4. Keep the product backlog small. Be ruthless about pruning it.
Simplification allows for maximizing the value, resulting in better outcomes. Large backlogs confuse the team will have to sift through more items. It will take more effort and decrease productivity and quality of discussions and implementation. Larger backlogs also tend to increase technical debt and feature blot. Review what stories can be removed from the backlog and keep it lean.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo Da Vinci (Source)
5. Ensure that the product backlog aligns with the product roadmap and vision.
One way to keep the backlog lean is to align it with the product roadmap and vision constantly. The alignment will help remove unnecessary features that do not add value to the outcomes.
6. Involve the entire team.
Unless the entire team participates, there will be dimensions of the requirements that may be left uncovered. As it is the team’s collective responsibility to ensure that the value is delivered to the customers, everyone must be aware of the details of all backlog items, in addition to being able to surface challenges on the complexities and feasibility.
7. Ensure stakeholder availability for clarifying questions.
Stakeholder involvement is crucial to ensure that the team is delivering value aligned with the customer’s requirements and providing clarity to the team. Through such communication, stakeholders must ensure that the product backlog items reflect the needs and priorities of the product.
8. Adopt tools to facilitate better discussions and collaboration.
Utilizing the right tools will help ensure an effective process for all of the above. Especially since remote teams are a reality, collaborative tools that provide continuous visibility and facilitate asynchronous communication provide a strong communication platform for the team. There are many such and other tools that teams can utilize. However, the tools are there to facilitate a process; hence be flexible about choosing and effectively using them. Otherwise, they may become the bottlenecks.
Finally
No list or article can give you all answers. This article contains some guidance. However, the team has to decide their way of working. Product backlog refinement is a crucial activity that, when done right, provides tremendous benefits for both efficiency and effectiveness. Hence, the team may need greater deliberations to decide on the exact process and steps. However, in the spirit of agile, be flexible about adapting to changes based on the feedback you receive, considering each change as an experiment.
