Refining Your Backlog

Scrum teams should spend approximately an hour each week on backlog refinement (previously known as backlog grooming.) During refinement sessions, the team ensures that the appropriate items are included in the product backlog and that they are prioritized appropriately. User stories can be added, deleted, or broken down into multiple, smaller stories, as necessary.

Who Attends Backlog Refinement?

The product owner, scrum master, and scrum team attend the backlog refinement meetings.

What Happens During Backlog Refinement?

The team discusses the items in the product backlog to get a better understanding of the work being requested. They might identify dependencies on other user stories or request clarification on acceptance criteria. The discussion in the refinement meetings should prepare the team to estimate the amount of work required to complete the user stories. During backlog refinement, you do not have to discuss every item in your backlog. You should, however, focus on those items that are most likely going to be worked during the next sprint. The product owner should have the backlog prioritized going into the backlog refinement session, so that priority items that might go into the next sprint are at the top of the backlog. If new items need to be added to the top of the backlog due to changing priorities, the product owner may choose to add them to the top of the backlog during the refinement session.

To determine how much work a single item (or user story) will take to complete, the team assigns story points, which are a relative measure of the amount of work required to finish that item, as is described in more detail later in this section.

Once your team becomes accustomed to breaking down tasks and understanding how long it takes your team to complete them, you should be able to reliably complete the same amount of work sprint after sprint. Estimating the amount of work required to complete a task does take some practice, so you should expect some amount of mistakes in your estimations (either overestimating or underestimating) as you get started. The speed in which you refine your backlog should decrease as you team becomes accustomed to the practice.