Product Backlog Refinement and Prioritization Techniques

Let’s look at a few concrete ways you can get your priorities in order. Remember, you needn’t get it exactly right from the beginning. The key is to actually do it — and with a systematic approach that you can gradually improve upon. Emergent- is for the new ideas that should be kept adding to the Product Backlog as and when the newer discoveries are being made. This is because this is a dynamic process and emerging ideas are required to keep the process continuous.

Most people are familiar with the concept of Definition of Done, sometimes abbreviated as DoD. The Definition of Done is a quality standard that represents all the things that a backlog item must meet to be considered “done” by the Scrum Team. You could think of the definition of done as the exit criteria that each item needs to meet at the end of the sprint. Common items on the DoD include developed, tested, user-tested, accepted by the product owner, and documentation complete. A regular and clean Product Backlog Refinement is absolutely essential for a successful Sprint – and thus for the success of the product.

What to avoid with backlog refinement

A product backlog Item or user story is progressively elaborated on as it moves up the product backlog. Avoid the trap of discussing and refining an item only once. Instead, refine it just-in-time again and again as needed with more details as more is discovered.

• Ask the product owner to provide enough work to last 2 sprints beyond the current sprint.
• Working with requirements is crucial for Agile software development, so teams often use Product Backlog Refinement to ensure that all parties understand what is expected of them.
• The ideas and User Stories that have the highest priority need to be delivered at the earliest.
• Scrum Teams use relative sizes because people can determine relations more easily.

Buy a Feature and 20/20 Vision helps Scrum Teams in ordering the Product Backlog. This UX Fishbowl opens up opportunities for Scrum Teams to break down large Product Backlog items into smaller ones that are still valuable to stakeholders. A UX Fishbowl consists of two groups and two steps, one group being the stakeholders and one being the Scrum Team. The steps are done in a sequence and as many times as needed. In refinement, Scrum Teams work with their stakeholders to develop these hypotheses.

Always use the definition of ready:

Analyse feedback / data from users, customers, and internal stakeholders. While goals are nice to have, you need to carry out specific actions to achieve them. So, here’s a checklist that you must regularly go through. You can use it to either evaluate if the backlog needs refinement or confirm that refinement is done for the moment.

The entire purpose of going into detailing and discussing the Product Backlogs is to satisfy and engage your customer. It is not the responsibility of the Product Owner only to keep the meeting on track and oriented towards the customers. It is important to call only key Stakeholders or top representatives from each team. If they disagree on the size, or if there are outliers, this usually reveals differing assumptions about the item.

With new teams, I coach them to create their definition of ready on a flip chart and then keep it on the wall in their team space. They keep their DoR handy during backlog refinement deep backlog and use it as a checklist when refining backlog items. The DoR can help the team focus and guide their discussions during the Product Backlog Refinement meeting.

Tips for Effective Product Backlog Refinement Meetings

If you need input from the development team, do it ahead of the meeting, immediately after, or again include just one or two people with the right skills. A great way to do the refinement work is to organise a product backlog workshop. The workshop involves the Scrum product owner and the development team, and carries out the five steps listed above. Your refinement meetings might take longer, or shorter, it depends on your product. Also, if you are just getting started with a product and using Scrum, expect the first several refinement meetings to take a lot longer.

— It must be done immediately or the cost of delay will grow radically. An example of an expedite feature is a severe bug that renders your product useless to all your customers. A common example of a linear cost of delay is money lost due to competitors already having a feature that you don’t. When you stack rank, you consider each backlog item and place it in order of priority. You start with one, then two, then three, and continue to n, the total number of items in your backlog.

In the early days, Developers will likely need to dedicate a lot of time for refinement. As the Product Backlog takes shape, it will have fine grained items towards the top and more coarse-grained items towards the middle and bottom. At this point, Developers can dedicate less and less time to refinement. The amount of time will never go down to 0 but will likely settle around 10% to 15% to maintain the Product Backlog in this shape and regularly prep for the next Sprint. You are the Product Owner or the Scrum Master and you need to ensure that the Product Backlog Refinement session happens professionally.

Financial Analyst – Success Stories

There is no recommended time length for a refinement session. Like I stated earlier, I shoot for an hour a week for the entire team. Remember, the Product Owner should be tending to the backlog very frequently, so they should come prepared, making the meeting more effective.

So you see, these were some of the Backlog Refinement techniques or tips that you can apply in the product backlog and make enable the whole agile team to perform well at their end. So, read this topic now and know all about product backlog refinement, its tools, and techniques. And don’t forget to stay home, stay safe, and never stop learning. In any team, the product owner comes with a list of backlog items that need to be prioritized. So below mentioned are the tasks during the backlog refinement.

Who should Carry out the Refinement Work?

Ideally, a Scrum Team has 2 sprints of ‘ready’ work on the product backlog so if a product owner goes on a holiday or falls ill, the team can go ahead. We find teams struggling to gets enough work in a ready state for the upcoming sprint. The Definition of Ready or DOR is a less popular quality standard but it is used to represent all the things that a backlog item has to meet in order to be “ready” to take into the sprint. You can consider the DOR as a checklist for the whole team to guide their backlog refinement process.

You could use a dedicated tool to help you refine or estimate, such as Easy Agile TeamRhythm, or you could just rely on a spreadsheet or a whiteboard and pen. Furthermore, to estimate all such stories that have not been estimated. The cost of delay categorization, when compared against cost of implementation, will often give you a good idea of what should be done first. “If you are going to quantify one thing, quantify the cost of delay,” says lean thought leader Donald Reinertsen.

The Product Owner invites a “celebrity” (an end user, subject matter expert, Product Owner, etc.) to the backlog refinement. Someone on the team should be chosen as an “interviewer.” Agree within the team about who will document questions and answers. The goal of estimation is to gain a shared understanding of the work in the Product Backlog, not absolute certainty about the implementation effort involved. Scrum Teams estimate Product Backlog items by having developers assign a size to them. The size does not express the absolute size of the Product Backlog item but the size in relation to the other items.

In fact, you may want to dedicate a couple of two-hour sessions throughout the first few weeks to really get a strong backlog in place. Over time, however, your refinement sessions should get shorter. Additionally, you don’t want to be that Product Owner who gets a bucket full of questions during a sprint planning meeting. That’s a strong indication that backlog refinement failed epically.

This avoids that not enough prepared PBIs are available in Sprint Planning. The Product Owner introduces the topic or product backlog item to be discussed. Make sure to discuss any updates to the product backlog in terms of what was added, what was removed, what was re-order, and what was learned. This ensures that everyone is on the same page in terms of what is coming up next and the general direction based on the product goals, roadmap, and feedback. Estimate anything new to assess potential risks and identify possible spikes to run in the next sprint to increase learning and mitigate the risks. One of the things that I love about Agile Software Development is how some practices have large, immediate impact on the project when you want to improve or change something.

Development Team Techniques

You need to leave flexibility for new items to enter the backlog as you learn from your releases. It is the job of the team to estimate the size of the https://globalcloudteam.com/ item considering it as the backlog process. If the estimation is done properly then it can serve as a good test for whether or not the team is aligned.

The need to Product Backlog Refinement best practices has been felt by Product Managers and Scrum Masters because this is one activity when done correctly, can get fruitful and value-driven results. Sohrab is a long-standing Certified Scrum Trainer and CEO of the Scrum Academy GmbH based in Cologne. He is a trained medical doctor and worked for Bain & Company as a consultant and as a CIO at SE-Consulting, among others, before founding the Scrum Academy. As a consultant and trainer, he has been supporting companies from a wide range of industries for over a decade on topics related to agile transformation, innovation and organizational development. Agile Leader Agile Leader Journey Learn more about agile leadership and find out how to take your company to the next level.

Backlog refinement is an essential process

The best way to determine how often your team needs Product Backlog Refinements and how long the meetings should last is by gaining experience and making mistakes. After all Product Backlog items have been assigned, the developers inspect the assignments done by others. A new size will be assigned if they disagree with the current size of the item. Magic Estimation and Planning Poker are estimation practices based on relative sizing.