“We haven’t done any proper grooming session since two sprints” – one of my team-members was pointing out on the retrospective. He was right, and although there was a good reason behind, I put it on top of my list items to fix immediately for the next iteration. After all we were so good at grooming before that particular project…
The story started two sprints ago where a major project was introduced for my team. We were all very happy, and started breaking it down together with the Product owner into epics and stories for the next couple of iterations focusing heavily on the upcoming sprint. Then it was my idea to substitute the grooming sessions each 2nd and 3rd week (of our 3-week iteration) with show & tell sessions every Friday. I explained everybody the good practice when we have an important project and need regular status/issues report we just do something like mini-sprints during each iteration. Each of those mini-sprints would last exactly one week and end on Friday with a two-hour show & tell session. The session should have been used for status catch-up (1h) and 1h for grooming the next iteration items. It worked almost good… except that two of the teammates could not fully contribute to that particular project stories and started doing others.
And of course the whole show & tell session time was occupied with discussions, questions and preparation for the particular project items and no time left to discuss the other stories (present and future). And the two guys felt isolated and not appreciated enough. My bad. It was really a focus and lack of time issue. So nowadays when the particular project is going on more smoothly we dropped the show & tells, have the regular grooming sessions and don’t mess them up with status and current situation catch-ups. If the product owner needs to know how we are doing – he is just welcome to join the daily stand-ups even remotely when he is not physically available at our location.
*** Backlog grooming (for non-practitioners)
It’s a time-boxed session for the team, the product owner and the scrum master to discuss, clarify and break down epics into stories or complex stories into smaller stories in preparation for the next sprint. All those activities are done during the backlog grooming session:
- Set priorities on the items
- Discuss and clarify
- Break down (refine) complex items
- Add acceptance criteria
- Estimate stories
- Rise possible risks and issues
- Set items to be spiked (additionally researched)
- Estimate (roughly) how many stories could be taken into the next sprint (if the priorities do not change before the sprint planning)
- Delete obsolete items
No comments:
Post a Comment