Backlog Refinement

The purpose of Backlog Refinement is for the Product Owner to review with the team items in the "backlog" to review, prioritize, assess, and update progress to "Ready" (this will help with Backlog Health Agile Metric). This ceremony occurs weekly for an hour to ensure that the backlog has enough user stories ~3-6 weeks in advance to prepare for the upcoming sprints.

Outcome: Additional context for Backlog Refinement allows the Scrum Master to coach the Product Owner and Team to:

• Remove user stories that are no longer relevant

• Create new user stories - from Spikes, bug issues, from continued work, etc

• Also can prevent future scope creep in an active sprint!

• Re-assess the prioritization of the backlog - i.e. if a developer completes their work for the sprint, no other unassigned stories are available, or team member does not additional assignee on his or her work, said developer can review the backlog and pick something up (!!! Only if the developer is confident that he or she will be able to complete it - we want to avoid carry-over!!!)

• Review stories and ensure that it includes DoR, Acceptance Criteria, DoD, and story point – Story Pointing / Estimation (Web view)

• If the team is pointing user stories high (8+), consider splitting the story if need be
  ▪ I.E. Can you split up Develop, QA, and Prod stories?

Best Practices:

• If applicable, have Product Owner share out the user stories that will be discussed

• Suggestion: Have a Technical Refinement - this includes SM, PO, TL, Pod Leader to review upcoming stories and add context; this will help speed up the process during B.R. and gives team to review the user story, ask questions, and add any additional context if needed

• Have the upcoming sprint prepared with user stories for the team to review again and ability to start thinking of what the Sprint Goal will be