When your backlog is cluttered like this, it can seem impossible to bring order to the chaos. But the Scrum Guide does not give a detailed description of how exactly to undertake this task. It provides flexibility and allows teams to choose the frequency of, approach to, and agile refinement techniques used in Product Backlog Refinement. The customizable nature of Scrum meetings is important, but you should still keep in mind the key elements of Product Backlog Refinement.

Where the first-principles approaches focus on what fundamental values drive prioritization, sometimes you need something even simpler. When you’re faced with a large, unordered backlog, it’s hard to say if item #5 is in the right spot. But you can probably figure out if #5 should be higher or lower than item #6. Prioritizing by team values means deciding what to work on based on the intuition and ideals of the team.

Review your specific goals and initiatives with the team to determine if there are any areas where you are lagging behind or changes to what customers are asking for. This is an example of a categorized product backlog refined in Aha! Backlog items are organized into different sections in the parking lot based on size and new items that still need review. Ague items being brought into Product Backlog refinement and the Development Team getting caught up in discussing any possible solution are signs of refinement gone wrong. Such discussion are consuming the energy of everyone in the meeting, including those involved in the discussion. When facing this teams often set a 10 minute time box to discuss a Product Backlog item.

About backlog refinement

You can skip today, but over time it will make other improvements more expensive and can cause the cost of delay to increase exponentially. Reverse — These make users unhappy when they’re there, happy when they’re not. For example, you might implement high-security features requiring an extra step to login.

However you choose to categorize your backlog, remember that you want to be able to easily see which features still need to be reviewed and which ones are already ready for the development team. This way product management and engineering can quickly identify what to work on next. Here we are focusing on the product backlog as a tool to inform your product roadmap. But it is worth noting that there are also other types of backlogs, including release and sprint backlogs.

Imagine you’re in the kitchen getting ready to prepare dinner. You open the fridge and find you don’t have quite everything you need to make a full meal because you didn’t take the time to check and prepare the right ingredients. Making dinner just became much more of a chore than originally anticipated. Create a graph using all items as nodes and with the dependencies arrows as edges. Highlight dependencies with arrows to clarify how the items depend on each other or on external factors. The remaining Product Backlog items are distributed among the developers.

The better or worse your estimates, the better or worse your prioritization. To apply this method to your product backlog, you would tag issues with either ‘important’ or ‘not important,’ and ‘urgent’ or ‘not urgent’. On the other hand, this approach does not consider value at all. That means you might find you’re delaying high-value items for a long time, because they never rise to being the smallest effort.

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Avoid having a product owner or business analysts refine the product backlog items on their own and then hand things over to the rest of the team to build and develop. Always have various skill sets represented in the conversations from analysis, development, and testing, etc. to avoid misunderstandings and ensure everyone is on the same page in terms of the work ahead. There should be no major surprises in sprint planning as most items being planned should already be familiar to the team via the refinement activities.

Be reasonable about how much you can achieve in, say, an hour. Whoever is running the meeting should prepare beforehand by looking through the backlog and choosing which items to look at. But if Backlog Refinement doesn’t become embedded, it can soon fall by the wayside. And when that happens, just watch the backlog become a free-for-all wishlist, full of undefined and unconnected items that lack rhyme or reason. A common example of a linear cost of delay is money lost due to competitors already having a feature that you don’t.

• To reach that goal, there are specific user stories that must be completed – often ones that depend on one another in a, well, waterfall pattern.
• Instead, try a technique that relies on finding a few fundamental truths, rather than detailed, precise or multi-dimensional criteria.
• 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.
• DEEP stands for detailed, emergent, estimated and prioritized.
• 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.

Each Developer individually estimates the item by assigning it a size. All choices remain hidden until everyone has estimated the item. 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. The process of grouping the remaining cards into the new list is repeated until the last card in the pile.

The steps are done in a sequence and as many times as needed. So, it’s all about the future work expressed as Product Backlog items in the Product Backlog. And, as we mentioned above, you should try to involve more experienced team members rather than more junior people. There are so many ways of refining a backlog that it would be impossible to give you the best one.

How to Prioritize the Backlog When Everything is Important

Remember that the Development Team, the Scrum Master, and Product Owner are the Scrum Team. Although the Product Owner can update the backlog themselves, it’s a great practice to involve the team. Talk about effort and break down any work that is too big to complete in a sprint into smaller user stories. The developers will then typically have their own planning meeting to go deeper on estimates. The main benefit of backlog refinement is ensuring that the items at the top of your backlog are relevant, detailed, and estimated. You want everything to be primed for scheduling as soon as the engineering team has capacity for the work.

This massive list included everything from follow-up tasks for previous releases to broad ideas about product direction; from clearly-defined and discrete user stories, to verbatim feedback from customers. Determine the order in which your backlog items should be executed and revisit their priority as you gain further details and insights. The process by which the product team refines their ideas on the product roadmap by a deeper understanding of what the real user problems are and then working out the best way to resolve them.

How do You Prioritize a Product Backlog?

These are the items for consideration during your next Sprint Planning meeting. If you find you have a particularly large queue of urgent items, you might need a different process to manage those – like even over statements. Keeping the product team updated is another purpose of backlog refinement. Without clarity in the backlog, there can be miscommunication or bad product decisions, either of which is going to hurt the project. Having a backlog refined will support effective communication among the team and keep everyone on the same page in terms of new features, any bugs that have been discovered, user insights, etc. His focus is on transforming and building high performing innovative organizations and teams that deliver impactful products early and maximize ROI.

But, to succeed in the marketplace, you also need to deliver attractive and one-dimensional features. So, when time comes to prioritize what goes into a release, it’s a good practice to pick one from each of the important categories above. You prioritize each item relative to all other items, which makes it simplifies the process and makes it clearer. This is often a more accurate and easier way to prioritize than to provide absolute values (such as “very high priority”). Since the Teams in Space website is the first initiative in the roadmap, we’ll want to break down that initiative intoepics and user stories for each of those epics.

Although only asking one person may speed up the estimation, that doesn’t demonstrate a shared understanding. And that’s something you should be keen about in backlog refinement. You shouldn’t refine backlog items currently under development. You should https://techiebun.com/2015/08/27/google-unveils-a-new-version-of-android-marshmallow/ refine the backlog for the next sprint or subsequent sprints. A great way to avoid this is involving some members of the Development Team in backlog refinement. Ask more experienced team members to detail backlog items or provide estimates.

What to avoid with backlog refinement?

This is the time where a Scrum Master of Agile Coach should intervene and explain the team the purpose of slicing. Product Backlog Refinement can be done during Sprint planning, although we at Exadel don’t recommend that, especially for new teams. It provides flexibility and allows teams to choose the frequency of, approach to, and techniques used in Product Backlog Refinement. Indeed, during refinement you should also check that the items are still actually relevant and that they haven’t morphed into something else in the meantime. Learn more about Hansoft, the better backlog management tool that offers all of these prioritization methods out of the box, so you can prioritize your way to success. Despite that compelling maxim, most product development organizations today have little, if any, shared knowledge of the cost of delay for each feature.

One popular Product Backlog Refinement technique, which works equally well in a project context, is to define what a ‘Ready’ item looks like. Your Backlog Refinement Meeting will naturally be longer than your regular Stand-Up meetings. But you don’t want it to be an hours-long slog that leaves the team frustrated and behind on their work. If the backlog is extensive, it is unrealistic to address every item. Ultimately, the question of who attends Backlog Grooming sessions is dependent on the context and information you need.

It may be possible only to implement the capability to read HRT and HR applications. Without this kind of split, a lot of flexibility is not available to the business. This post is part of a series on ways to split work items so that a minimum viable product becomes minimum, not maximum. To meet schedules, deliver valuable products, and exceed your stakeholder’s expectations, you need the ability to flex scope and offer an actual minimum marketable product. You need to know how to break down your work to be forced by technology or business processes to deliver anything more than the minimum.

Weighted Shortest Job First is a product backlog prioritization approach that attempts to get you the biggest bang for your buck. You’ve probably done this sort of prioritization in your personal life. If you’ve ever had a free 15 minutes, and picked the smallest tasks to finish – you’ve used the smallest effort first prioritization technique. However, because Stack Ranking relies on just one person, keep in mind that much depends on that person’s perspective and willingness to bring others into the process. If they’re unaware of the value of some user stories or have a bias against them for whatever reason, those issues will likely get missed, even if they’re important. These questions are vital to ask before the next sprint, because it gives the product owner an opportunity to answer them.

Product Backlog Prioritization Your Way

Client services or account managers, for instance, can shed valuable light on the client’s perspective. Depending on the item in question, the client themselves might want to be directly involved in the refinement activity. If you would have to cancel your release if you couldn’t include it, then it’s a Must Have. Must-Have user stories are those that you guarantee to deliver because you can’t deliver without, or it would be illegal or unsafe without. The Kano model is tremendously useful in organizations that tend to only do Must-Be features.

Dependencies may hinder the Product Owner from ordering the Product Backlog so that the value is maximized. Dependencies increase the risk of delays and hinder the Scrum Team from creating a usable increment until the end of the sprint. The Product Owner explains the Product Backlog item to be estimated.

If it’s work for the development team, keep it in a single backlog. To maintain our backlog, Jordan (our CEO & product manager) will review new issues, and compare them to the existing prioritized backlog, to see where in the stack they rank. First Principles is the idea of breaking down something complex into its simplest, smallest parts, like taking a cell and breaking it down into molecules. We often talk about breaking down user stories into the smallest tasks, but the same idea can apply to prioritization frameworks. I knew the factors that mattered for our team were reaching the most users, and making the most of our limited resources as a small team. So, I settled on the RICE framework for backlog prioritization, pulled everything into a spreadsheet, and got to work.