Many a time we have come across a situation where team members complain that stories were not ready before the sprint.
At times, people complain that they are seeing the story for the very first time. Does this sound familiar?
Another common complaint I have heard is that the Acceptance Criteria is not fully developed.
How can we address these issues?
It is very simple. All the stakeholders of the project should agree upon a cadence where the team meets every single week to go through the product backlog and refine the same.
When is the best time to refine the Product Backlog?
- Ideally once in a week and time box it for 1 hour. In a sprint of 2 weeks, at least teams should have met twice.
What is the Purpose of this meeting?
- Plan for the next Iteration (sprint)
- Refine, Prioritize the stories
- Further, develop acceptance criteria
- The team should have visibility of at least 3 Iterations
Who are the participants?
- It is owned and prioritized by the Product Owner
- Scrum Master, Product Owner, Development team (both developers and testers)
- Subject Matter Experts, Architects
What is the outcome of this meeting?
- Scrum Master facilitates the product backlog refinement meeting
- Product Owner picks up each story which would be part of the discussion to clarify any doubts and also to update Acceptance Criteria
- This helps the team to identify the dependencies between the teams
- Call out from technical architects if it is not technically viable to do right away in the upcoming Iteration
- Summarize the action items, decisions made and make sure this is visible to all the relevant stakeholders
The above should help in reducing the frustration during the Iteration Planning meeting and also the teams would get the sense of collaboration to set clear cut acceptance criteria.
