How do you prioritize Backlog Grooming?

Prioritizing backlog is not a one time activity. Its an ongoing process all through out the agile project. Agile allows for accepting changes & incorporating feedbacks quickly using the feedback loop, which is why, product backlog for one's agile project will keep piling up stuff as features & changes requested by customer & code refactoring or tech debt. Product owner (representative of customers for the business) is accountable for backlog refinement. He may be assisted by team (& other stakeholders) in arriving at the priority of items, esp. technical aspects if unfamiliar. Product backlog prioritization must rank items by their preceived delivery value for customer. Higher the value it offers to the customer, higher it must be ranked.

Backlog grooming involves a regular, cross-functional team review of user stories, focusing on updating and prioritizing based on techniques like MoSCoW or value estimation. The process includes assessing business value, addressing high-risk items early, and incorporating customer feedback. It requires openness to emergent changes, balancing short-term wins with long-term goals, and transparent communication within the team. Thorough documentation of decisions ensures clarity and reference for future iterations, contributing to the overall effectiveness of the product backlog.

Assessing the current state of the product backlog involves evaluating its alignment with user needs, business objectives, and technical constraints. It includes assessing the clarity, consistency, and actionability of user stories and acceptance criteria, as well as the accuracy of estimates and identification of dependencies. Regular reviews and updates of the backlog are crucial. Tools like backlog health checks or maturity models can aid in evaluating the quality and readiness of backlog items.

To prioritize backlog grooming: Frequency: Schedule regular grooming sessions. Urgency & Importance: Focus on high-priority items. Dependencies: Address tasks with dependencies first. Customer Feedback: Prioritize items based on customer needs. Risk Mitigation: Tackle tasks that mitigate risks early. Team Capacity: Consider the team's workload. Continuous Refinement: Regularly refine priorities. Collaboration: Involve stakeholders and team members. Size & Complexity: Break down large tasks; prioritize foundational elements. Alignment with Sprint Goals: Ensure alignment with sprint objectives.

We banned the word "grooming". I guess it is mostly in Germany / EU known, that this word is deeply connected with child pornography. Not only since the huge discussions around the topic of "chatcontrol" this word is only used in this context.

When deciding on refining, reordering, or removing backlog items, consider factors such as value, urgency, risk, effort, feedback, and dependencies. Techniques like MoSCoW, WSJF, or RICE can be used to rank and compare items based on these criteria. Involving the product owner, stakeholders, and customers in the prioritization process ensures alignment and buy-in.

While techniques like MoSCoW, WSJF are great, lifting it up and aligning it with your product strategy and roadmap can be very useful for a backlog prioritization exercise. Keep OKRs in line of sight and decide what user stories contribute to meeting those. Having a practical and logical approach helps.

Product backlog refinement is an ongoing process. Its an effort of segregating more valuable & urgent items than lesser valuable ones. Former needs to be addressed early in a timely manner in order to help businesses gain edge by customers getting value. In order to prioritize backlog, usually "value delivery to customer" is key focus. Delivering items that offers value to customer are ranked higher than other items. Items that address regulations, which business must comply with to sustain, are ranked higher. Some items which customer may ask for urgently are placed higher place in product backlog. If X depends on Y & X is urgent or highly ranked, then Y also finds itself placed higher, before X. This refinement process happens continually

Defining prioritization criteria for backlog grooming is crucial for making informed decisions about which items to refine, reorder, or remove. The specific criteria we can use depending on project, team, and organizational goals. Here usable techniques like MoSCoW, WSJF, or RICE are productive for rank. But backlog items to follow agile process are most popular.

One of the approach while grooming the backlog is to build MVP & then use build, measure, feedback loop to improve the product. Always try to build a fully integrated demo product. Some early weight lifting sets the rails for faster delivery later.

In my experience, great Product Owners are constantly refining the backlog everyday. They may have formal backlog refinement sessions with the team on a weekly basis, but there is so much more to backlog refinement than a meeting with the team each week. Activities ongoing like: - Working with data (the team or a data team) to find insights into how the current product is working, what are users struggling with? - Observing users use the product - Talking to users and business leaders about their pains and goals - Researching industry trends - Connecting with other teams that have adjacent or complementary products All of this can and should yield backlog items and prioritization considerations.

Backlog grooming has to be an ongoing process as the backlog increases, the complexity also increases. This makes the team understand the business needs from the customer, make sure the feature, story and task is in alignment to it and the test cases are written in a way to ensure the quality. Frequency should be high during the initial sprints and can be reduced over a period of time the team gets more acquainted with product vision and way forward. At any point of time the Product Owner should ensure that the backlog is healthy and the team is aware of the work that awaits them minimum two sprints ahead.

I've found that it's quite beneficial to formally plan the time and effort spent by product owners as stories in the sprint. It ensures that the product owners are committed and accountable.

Applying few best practices for backlog grooming like eliminating user stories that are no longer relevant or needed, developing and adding new user stories based on changing customer needs , reprioritising stories as per upcoming sprint, calculating effort, reevaluating story estimates as per new or updated information.

Use per planning meeting to review backlog with product and engineering before sprint planning meeting. Roadmap, release plan, sprint goals are great tools to set milestones. Review and adjust the backlog order of stories to avoid underutilizing sprint capacity.

Key here is to collaborate & train the team to write done criteria with measurable qualifier for the story to be complete. This will ensure there aren't runaway stories at sprint close. Keep an eye on deviation from forecast and if you see a negative pattern address it in postmortem meeting. Demo an actual whole working system (unit test, devOps harness, system integration test) at sprint completion to assess the feasibility of the product design and gather early feedback.

If you have large or complex backlog items, consider breaking them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Smaller items are easier to prioritize and estimate.

Evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the process, team satisfaction with backlog quality, and its support for product delivery and customer value. Metrics like velocity, lead time, cycle time, and customer satisfaction can measure and guide improvements. Collect feedback from the team, product owner, and stakeholders using retrospectives, surveys, or interviews to drive iterative enhancements.

While product managers review the the backlog periodically, it may be good practice to review with product and leads in quarterly pre-planning to align organization level OKRs. Downstream developments can bubble up and product demands can be revised to ensure the alignment happens. As a team the organization publish their OKRs which they agreed and prioritized.

Consider that there are different levels of backlog refinement. You may need to refine at the Product Roadmap level, the release level, and the sprint/iteration level; not all at the same time or in weekly sessions, but I like to think of it in terms of weekly with the team at the sprint level, and the release and roadmap levels less frequently depending on how often the team needs to.

Consider technical debt and infrastructure improvements. If there are critical technical tasks or architectural changes that need to be made, prioritize them to ensure the overall health of the product.

Backlog refinement as mentioned in this article, is not an agile ceremony. Scrum Guide does not define refinement as an event. Instead, it is defined as an ongoing and continuous activity. The idea behind describing as an activity is to emphasize that refinement can and must happen as needed. Unlike other events, where Scrum guide provides guidance on time-box, it leaves the decision to the team and PO on how much time should be devoted to refining items. This is best determined based on your needs and context.

I really enjoyed reading some tips and tricks that others have had, but we want to make sure we are using the correct terminology. Backlog Refinement is the language, not Grooming. As an Agile Coach in Backlog Refinement, I like to bring up Dependencies and Risks to make sure we have a full picture of the level of effort.

The current world of Agile is a high-paced environment with areas that always need attention. Align backlog grooming with business strategy for goal-directed focus. Address technical debt and spikes for sustainability. Implement a 'Definition of Ready' to clarify actionable items. Involve DevOps for deployability insights. In scaled Agile, coordinate with other Agile Release Trains for managing cross-team dependencies. Incorporate customer feedback for direct relevance. Use specialized tools for efficiency. Leverage grooming as a skill-building exercise. Adapt to the needs of remote teams. Consider industry-specific compliance and regulation factors.