Backlog grooming is the recurring process of reviewing your product backlog to-do list to cut out the fat, prioritize what’s left and make prioritized items actionable to your team and relevant to end users. In this guide, we explore what backlog grooming is, including its key terms, what meetings look like and who should attend them. We then dive into the best practices and tools you can use to make the most of your backlog grooming process.
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What Is Backlog Grooming?
Backlog grooming—also known as backlog refinement or management—is a recurring process of reviewing a product backlog list to decide which items should remain, be removed or be updated or added. Such items include product features, technical work, bugs and user stories. The remaining items are prioritized in order of importance and based on customer value. Prioritized items are noted and discussed in detail so that team members can act on them readily.
Key Backlog Grooming Terms
The topic of backlog grooming comes with many terms that are not intuitively understandable. Such terms include user stories, bugs, features, splitting user stories, backlog refinement, backlog grooming, backlog, sprint, estimates, points, Scrum, Scrum master and agile. You will see these terms used often throughout this discussion. To help you make sense of this discussion, we define each common term below.
Backlog Grooming Activities
In backlog grooming meetings, a few activities are commonly included. For example, adding user stories, prioritizing items (like user stories), updating items, adding or removing items, splitting user stories and evaluating and reevaluating estimates are all common backlog grooming activities. Here is an overview of what each entails.
- Adding or removing user stories. Teams often add new user stories that are infused with new discoveries, insights or customer feedback.
- Prioritizing items. Stories are prioritized to show their immediate value to customers and prepare them for upcoming sprint planning sessions.
- Adding or removing items. Items that may be added or removed include features, bugs and technical work. Some may be added to reflect new user feedback or discoveries while others are deleted as irrelevant.
- Updating items. User stories are often updated to provide clarity and new details. Story points are also updated and reestimated.
- Splitting user stories. Large user stories are split into smaller ones that can be addressed on a per-sprint basis and then reorganize points to reflect each work chunk’s complexity and effort.
- Evaluating and reevaluating estimates. Tasks are estimated based on the amount of effort it will take the team to complete them, then assigned points to reflect that effort.
- Clarifying ambiguity. Stories are discussed to uncover ambiguities, then clarity is provided so stories are ready for sprint-planning sessions.
Backlog Grooming Team
The person who serves as the backlog grooming lead may differ based on the team and its needs. Often, the lead is the product owner or manager. However, it is common for a Scrum master or project manager to lead. Their responsibilities entail scheduling the session, inviting the right team members, keeping conversations on-topic, managing time, ensuring no topic dominates the meeting and following up with team members after the meeting.
Other attendees include the delivery team or its key representatives and the quality assurance (QA) team. The delivery team is comprised of product developers—like designers and engineers, for example. Their presence ensures valuable expertise is infused into user stories. The QA team ensures a high-quality final deliverable. They should be present at all backlog grooming meetings to verify steps are taken for quality assurance.
Backlog Grooming Benefits
Backlog grooming helps teams trim the fat off of their user stories and tasks lists, collaborate more efficiently, prioritize the most relevant and needed backlogs, make tasks lists more achievable and create buy-in among team members. In the end, these benefits lead to highly-productive sprints and more frequent product improvements. Following is a deeper dive into each of these benefits.
Backlog Hygiene
Your grooming sessions should involve a process of removing unnecessary backlog inclusions, such as now-irrelevant user stories, bugs and technical work. Team members can clarify whether old backlogs should remain, then help to prioritize those that make the cut. Doing so removes clutter that can distract from accomplishing necessary work going forward.
Efficient Collaboration
Backlog planning allows all team members to come together and learn from each other regarding their areas of expertise. Each expert, for example, contributes information about new discoveries and answers questions about new or existing user stories. Then, come sprint planning days, backlog clarity and familiarity fosters immediate collaboration. In addition, an appreciation for team members’ contributions encourages everyone to work together.
More Frequent Product Improvements
Backlog grooming allows team members to set a firm foundation for efficient sprint planning going forward. More efficient spring planning means faster delivery of relevant product features that users need and will love.
Prioritization of Most-needed User Stories
In backlog management, team members prioritize tasks that deliver the most user value. Then, those priority tasks are updated with details so team members can understand what they need to do to complete the tasks involved in the item’s development. Example details may include stakeholder feedback, new bugs and changing company policies, for example. In the end, most-needed stories are both prioritized and prepared for team action.
Create Buy-in for Product Updates
As team members gain more information on a backlog’s user relevancy, new discoveries and information and the “why” behind prioritized backlog items, they gain clarity regarding future sprints. As such, during sprint planning and execution, team members are unhindered by fear of the unknown, which often hinders buy-in.
More Doable Task Lists
Enthusiastic teams often throw lots of tasks into the to-do mix, creating unmanageable lists. Backlog grooming helps to surface the most needed and relevant user stories, then trim them down into manageable work chunks. They can also be placed onto project management boards, such as those offered by Trello, to clearly delineate the task lists at hand and, thereby, cut down on chaotic lists that overwhelm.
More Productive Sprints
We’ve covered the fact that backlog grooming offers better collaboration, more feasible task lists, backlog item prioritization, team member buy-in, an infusion of team members’ expertise and less clutter. With these benefits, backlog grooming now means future sprints are more focused. More focused sprints mean higher productivity in a shorter amount of time.
Backlog Grooming: Best Practices
Before your backlog grooming meeting, prepare well to set the stage for a productive and efficient meeting. In addition, limit your backlog grooming meetings by focusing on more than one sprint in each meeting as time allows. Then, during your meeting, practice and model active listening, use a DEEP format, prioritize the preferences and needs of the customer, manage your time well and note dependencies.
Prepare Well
Before your backlog grooming meeting, review your quarterly goals so you know which stories should be prioritized in light of them. In addition, gather feedback from stakeholders on their expectations surrounding product development. Then, do a preliminary prioritization of backlog items so you know what items to focus on in your meeting. Finally, share your notes with team members so they can be prepared for a productive backlog grooming meeting.
Prioritize the Customer or End User
Your products are made for your customers or end users. As such, their voices must be front and center in all backlog grooming meetings. So, before you meet, make sure you understand your customers’ or end users’ wants and needs. Then, during your meetings, discuss each decision or idea against what the customer wants or needs. Doing so sets a strong foundation for successful sprints and product launches.
Use a DEEP Format
DEEP is an acronym that represents a backlog grooming format developed by Roman Pichler, the author of “Agile Project Management with Scrum.” It focuses on four structural elements, namely, detailed appropriately, estimated, emergent and prioritized—or DEEP. Here is a closer look at each of these elements.
- Appropriately detailed. Highly prioritized backlog items should be more detailed than other items so team members thoroughly understand the task involved in realizing the item and can easily act on them.
- Estimated. Backlog items should be estimated to reflect the cost of implementation. These estimations should then be continually reviewed to update them based on current information.
- Emergent. Your product backlog is dynamic. As more information comes in, you should expect to update it with items and stories being added, removed and reprioritized.
- Prioritized. Tasks should be prioritized to reflect the order in which they should be completed and which offers the most customer or user value.
Listen Actively
During backlog grooming meetings, model active listening. Instead of listening to respond, listen to understand. When team members share ideas, suggestions, expertise or questions, make it a reciprocal conversation by looking at them, summarizing their statements to gain clarification and asking questions. Continually invite other team members to get involved by asking their opinions and ensuring all have ample opportunities to share without interruptions.
Manage Session Time Well
Backlog grooming meetings should last 45 minutes or less. Keeping them at this length helps to ensure everyone stays focused on and enthusiastic about the meeting content. To keep your meetings within this parameter, limit the discussion of each item―user story, feature, bug or technical work, for example―to 15 minutes or less. Long debates should be put on hold and a separate meeting should be arranged to address them with a subset of team members.
Keep Dependencies in Mind
Dependent activities depend on the completion of other activities for their initiation. For example, to build a house, the design stage must end before building begins. Thus, building the house is dependent on first designing it. Note which tasks depend on others before backlog grooming. Doing helps teams make better decisions surrounding the features, bugs, technical work or user stories that should be cut or remain and how they should be prioritized.
Schedule Fewer Meetings
Meetings have a nasty tendency to interrupt workflows and, so, reduce productivity. Too many can also leave team members frustrated by their inability to manage their time around meetings. So, when possible, combine meetings to focus on more than one sprint per meeting. In doing so, you reduce the number of meetings needed to get the same amount of backlog grooming done. It’s a win-win for your company and your team.
Just be careful to use this tip wisely. Focusing on sprints that are far into the future may mean you have to repeat the work closer to sprint initiation to incorporate new customer feedback or remove irrelevant features, bugs or technical work, for example. Repeat work means more meetings, which, of course, defeats the purpose of this tip. So, be careful to only focus on near-future sprints in each meeting.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Follow Up
After your meeting, make sure prioritized backlog work is actionable by communicating the next steps and providing clarity to your team. You can do so in three ways. First, send follow-up notes clarifying and documenting important decisions surrounding your backlog. Also, reach out to team members to answer questions that went unanswered during your meeting. Finally, arrange follow-up sessions to debate or infuse expertise into backlog items further as needed.
Backlog Grooming Tools
Five popular tools for backlog grooming include monday.com, Trello, Jira, Yodiz and Pivotal Tracker. Here is a closer look at why each one best suits backlog grooming teams.
Bottom Line
Backlog grooming meetings provide an opportunity for your team to come together, choose relevant priorities for your end users and customers, then get your team ready to act on them. To ensure the most productive meetings, make sure your team is prepared, the right people are there, all team members are respected and actively included, time is properly managed, the team stays focused during the meeting and all loose ends are tied up after the meeting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is grooming in agile?
Backlog grooming is a recurring event where a team comes together to ensure the next few sprints are prepared for sprint planning. Activities include adding or removing user stories, features, bugs or technical work; estimating the effort needed to complete each item on the backlog; updating user stories with new information or feedback; splitting user stories into smaller, more manageable work chunks and prioritizing items for near-future sprint planning.
When should backlog grooming meetings occur?
Backlog grooming meetings should occur at least once per sprint to allow your team to ask questions, discuss discoveries or stakeholder feedback, prioritize items, adjust features, gain clarity and estimate sprint requirements. Doing so helps your team go into sprint planning sessions fully equipped to be productive. Backlog grooming meetings may also be helpful at the end of the sprint, mid-sprint or on an ad-hoc basis when your team needs to regroup.
What is backlog grooming vs. sprint planning?
Backlog grooming meetings prepare for long-term future projects. In contrast, a sprint planning meeting focuses on only one short-term work item. In a backlog meeting (which comes before sprint planning), user stories, features, bugs and technical work that span multiple sprints are assessed, prioritized, adjusted and added or removed. However, sprint planning focuses on setting a goal for and planning required activities to complete one sprint.
