How good backlog grooming enables teams to move faster and provide better products.

1. Personal Hygiene
THE IMPORTANCE OF GOOD GROOMING HABITS

2. Backlog grooming meeting
a.k.a. Backlog refinement
a.k.a. Backlog estimation
a.k.a. Story time

3. Backlog grooming meeting
What – Time-boxed meeting to review candidate stories for
upcoming sprints
Why – Help the Product Owner get the Backlog ready for the next
sprint planning meeting
When – 1-2 times per sprint (about 1 hour per sprint-week total)
Who – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Dev, Test, UX, SMEs (if
needed), i.e. the whole team

4. I
N
V
E
S
T

5. Independent
Negotiable
Valuable
Estimable
Small
Testable

6. Planning
Poker
Modified Fibonacci

7. Planning
Poker
T-Shirt Sizes

8. Too much grooming

9. What makes
for good grooming?

10. Good grooming is about understanding what you
are going to do and how you are going to do it.
It is not about estimating.

11. What makes for good grooming?
A consistent vision
◦ How does this story align with the roadmap
objectives? Strategic objectives?
◦ Does it stand alone?
◦ What is the priority of the story?
Team Engagement
◦ Everyone participates in the discussion
◦ Everyone estimates
Honesty
◦ What are the open issues/known unknowns?
◦ What are the risks?
Flexibility
◦ Stories will change, get added, get removed, get
pushed
Safety
◦ There are no stupid questions
◦ Estimates are not commitments

12. TRUST

14. Be Prepared!

15. Pre-grooming
GROOMING BEFORE THE GROOM

17. The Pre-Grooming Team

18. Product Owner
What do I really want?

19. Engineering
How can we break things down?
How big is this?

20. QA/Test
How complex is this to test?
How big is this?

21. Subject Matter
Experts
Help clarify what the customer wants

22. When it is not important to make a decision,
it is important not to make a decision

23. YAGNI

24. Y’Ain’t Gonna Need It

25. Maximize the work not done

26. Please excuse the long letter, I
didn’t have time to make it short.
– Blaise Pascal

27. Not every story needs to get to the full group

28. Not every story is ready to get to the full group

29. Definition of Ready
Why – What are the stakeholders or the business trying to achieve?
What is their goal or outcome? What is the business context?
What – What is the outcome vision? What is the end result of the
user story?
How – What is the strategy to implement the user story? Is the story
small enough (i.e., story points versus team velocity)?

30. Definition of Ready
Acceptance criteria
Out-of-scope criteria
UX (wireframes, comps, description – whatever your team needs for
the story)
Appropriate size
Identify open issues

31. Definition of Ready
Depends on how close you are to working on a story
Roadmap – high level hand-wavy
Current sprint
◦ Agreed upon level of acceptance criteria
◦ Does dev feel like they have enough detail to build it
◦ Does test feel like they have enough detail to test it
◦ Is the UX defined well enough to build
◦ Is it granular enough
◦ Is it tied to the roadmap, or is it a one-off
◦ What type of story is it? Maintenance? Feature? Bug?
Upcoming sprint
◦ Somewhere in the middle

32. Definition of Ready
Not necessarily 100%...close enough to be confident in committing
to the story in a sprint
Reduce the number of necessary conversations during the sprint
What is your team comfortable with committing to?

33. Definition of Ready – Why should I care?
Avoids wasting time, both when a story is started and after a few days' work (if more
information is needed to complete the story, the work on it stops).
Helps the team identify when a team member becomes overwhelmed.
Reduces requirements churn in development.
Keeps the team members accountable to each other.

34. Breaking down stories
Stories should be able to be completed within a few minutes or hours
Fewer acceptance criteria per story
Development is easier because the stories are narrowly focused
Testing is easier because there is less to test
Easier to identify bottlenecks in your system
Much higher overall team utilization
Easier to identify what not to do

35. only have meaningful conversations

36. Other Techniques

37. Personas
Help you understand user segments
User-centric design
Discovered, not fabricated
Personas ≠ Roles
◦ 1+ persona per role
◦ 1+ role per persona

38. Affinity Estimation
Get through a lot of stories quickly
Works well for mature teams
Good initial estimate, not so good for
accuracy

39. The Benefits
OF GROOMING WELL

40. The benefits of good grooming
Less need for upfront spec work
Faster time-to-market
Stable velocity
Predictability
Transparency
Improved team morale
Better cohesion
Meaningful change management

41. http://scrumtrainingseries.com/BacklogRefinementMeeting/BacklogRefinementMeeting.htm

42. Ian Garrison
ian.garrison@equifax.com
http://itsnotrocketscience.me