Continual Backlog Grooming

Continual Backlog Grooming

Product owner (PO) needs to keep the user stories backlog updated for the team to use during spring planning. During backlog grooming, the PO states their goal for the sprint. This can usually be traced to where you are on the release plan, and helps focus the team's effort to that release goal. The PO and the attendees, review the stories for clarity and completeness. The team reviews each story, having a conversation about its details and collectively confirms what the definition of done will be for that story.

In a team transitioning to the scrum or relatively new to scrum, there should be two meetings:

Sprint Preplanning- It is attended by all the team members, PO, Scrum Master, SME and the technical expert. The team hears the upcoming stories, and identifies any acceptance criteria (AC) gaps that the PO needs to fill, before sprint planning.

Backlog grooming- The backlog grooming meeting, however, is really intended for a subset of the team. The PO, scrum master, subject matter expert, and technical expert. To write new stories, remove stories or groom them by rewording, or reprioritizing. Their job is to make sure the backlog accurately reflects the vision.

There should be a gap between the sprint preplanning and  backlog grooming meeting, so that PO has adequate time to find answers for the questions about the user stories and ACs.

Scrum master and PO can decide to have only the backlog grooming session with some members of the team attending or all the team members attending. In this case, there should be an option for the team members to leave if they are not needed after particular point of time.

Also, during the session, or as a result of the ceremony, the backlog is updated, and both the release plan, and roadmap, are adjusted to show any changes that have been triggered by this event. All three updated items play into the demo and sprint planning meetings.

Matured Scrum teams might not need such a formal set up for backlog grooming but arriving at a consensus to take up user stories for the sprint, keeping the product vision, is paramount.