The Scrum Guide describes Product Backlog Refinement as “the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog.” New and even experienced agile teams often underestimate the importance of well-groomed stories and find the process of reviewing numerous stories, breaking them down, and estimating the work chaotic and cumbersome. As this happens, teams push problems downstream into sprint planning meetings—or worse, into the sprint. Becky Moshenek shares how, working with the Product Owner, they create stories for backlog items to be reviewed. The stories include a link to the actual item, tasks outlining how and what to review, and a deadline for a future refinement meeting. These become refinement stories that are assigned to team members and brought into a sprint for an allotted ten percent of their time. Coordinating the team’s effort around backlog refinement in this way has cut meeting times, increased team involvement, produced more polished items, and made for a happier team.
Becky Moshenek
ANCILE Solutions
Becky Moshenek is a certified ScrumMaster for ANCILE, a provider of best-in-class learning and performance support software. She currently works on ANCILE’s largest and most complex product which is used by Fortune 100 companies for their enterprise-wide training and productivity software. As ANCILE progresses from waterfall to agile, Becky provides support for the quality assurance and development teams. She has more than fifteen years of professional experience with the software development lifecycle, working with both large government infrastructures and smaller start-up projects. Becky also runs a local gym franchise in South Carolina with her husband, Michael.
Speaker Presentations
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 1:30pm
Product Definition
Product Backlog Refinement: Grooming Your User Stories