In this blog, I will try to explain how you as a developer, can make most out the refinement or backlog grooming sessions.
If you are working in an Agile environment, you would have probably heard of one of the meetings or the session, called as Refinement. Refinement or backlog grooming are the meetings where future sprint user stories are presented to the team.
Refinements are basically time boxed events, scheduled once or twice in a week, where each member of the development team is invited to discuss the prioritized backlog items. In these sessions, product owner or business analysts present their user stories, and its acceptance criteria. The technical solution, UI/UX design is also accompanied with the acceptance criteria.
In our team, the refinement session is scheduled twice in a week, on every Wednesday and Friday, for 2 hours. One day before the refinement, we normally receive an email containing the list of user stories, that will be presented in the next refinement session.
A well prepared user story normally takes two or three refinement sessions before it becomes ‘Ready for Development’. These ready for development stories are taken up for next sprint planning.
For me as a developer, during refinements, I often ignored and paid very less attention to the story details. I was developing some other story, during these sessions. This is where, the problem starts.
When in the next sprint planning session, when I pick any of these stories for development work, only then I realize that the story is not yet fully ‘Ready for development’. Most of the times the technical solution or architecture is not complete, the UX design is not ready, and the acceptance criteria is ambiguous. When I raised concerns after the planning is done, not everyone is happy.
Following are few helpful suggestions, on how you can avoid such situations.
1. Read the stories, acceptance criteria carefully
Read the user stories line by line, word by word. I have faced issues in the past, where a single line in the acceptance criteria had resulted in defects. Make sure, that the acceptance criteria are covering all the aspects, both negative and positive testing scenarios of a feature. If you feel, something is missing and if whole team agrees, request the analyst to add or make changes in the story there and there. The discussions done are often forgotten. So, it is very necessary to request updates in the acceptance criteria in the session itself.
2. Discuss the technical solution with the architects
Most of the user stories often require technical designs. Review technical designs carefully, and make sure you understand the whole flow, because your whole development work will be based on these technical designs. Request architects to supply with necessary artefacts like swaggers, endpoints, sample input outputs, or contracts, with the designs.
3. Ask Relevant questions
Many times, you are may feel shy to ask a question. You may think, ‘how can I ask this dumb question?’. Please do not feel shy, be bold, raise your hand and ask the question, or raise a concern.
4. Request for user stories before grooming sessions
Always request for user stories in advance, that are going to be discussed. This will give you some time to do some homework. This will ensure you are better prepared for the refinements.
5. Reject user stories, if not ready
Before coming to refinements, a business analyst or product owner, is suppose to be ready with the description, acceptance criteria, technical solution, or UX/UI design. If you feel that a user story is prematurely pulled in the refinement session, with no readiness, then you can propose to reject the story. Make a suggestion to take up this story for discussion in the future refinement sessions, when everything required is in place.
I hope, with these points you can better prepare yourself for the Agile refinement sessions.