A Backlog Grooming meeting is one of the most important meetings for a Scrum-team. Its main objective is to enhance the quality of your backlog. The predictability of improving your product is directly proportional to the quality of your backlog and that is exactly why Backlog Grooming is such an important meeting.

When a Sprint Planning meeting is focusing specifically on the next Sprint, a Backlog Grooming should be looking a bit further. How far? Well that depends on the team, the quality of the backlog and the life cycle of the product. At the beginning of the project perhaps only a Sprint or one and a half Sprints can be looked forward to, but in the later stages of the project, the horizon moves further. However, I would argue that you should not take the story details down to task-level for stories a couple sprints away.

In Backlog Grooming the point is that already identified backlog items and their descriptions, contents, objectives, risks and workloads are discussed. But that is not the only goal of the meeting. You should also try to spot anything missing from the backlog, tickets being in the wrong priority order or if some stories are too large compared to how close they are to getting implemented.

Next you will see nine tips for a good Backlog Grooming meeting!

1. Discussion in Backlog Grooming

Grooming meetings should be hosted so that there will be discussions about stories. This is the center of the whole meeting. Even though most of the preparations would be done in small groups or individually, I still recommend having one shared session in which people get to introduce and talk about their prepared stories. In case no preparations are made, then the idea is to talk in Grooming.

2. Writing down the discussion for everyone to see

It is absolutely necessary that someone writes down the discussion as it progresses. The point is to write down what people say: either in story description, in acceptance criteria, as tasks or as additional information. The team should also be coached so that if they see something written down and they disagree with it, they will speak up about it. I have noticed that it is easier for people to show their disagreeance if they see things written down – if someone says something that you might disagree with you necessarily will not say it out loud. But if someone writes it down as a concretized approved fact, it’s easier to say something about it. You have to, because otherwise the others will make a mistake.

So you should indeed document the conversation quickly in the story description. You should agree on who does this beforehand – I myself recommend the Scrum master or a third party participant. I would like that the Product Owner should not have to worry about writing stuff down but rather focus on listening and thinking.

3. Story descriptions in order

This is also related to a Sprint Planning meeting. The team should agree on when the story has been groomed. For example: there is a description, acceptance criteria, effort estimate and it has been discussed about. The next rule should be that any story that has not been groomed, is simply not uploaded to sprint. I recommend that you are obedient about this. Last minute stories can easily be groomed during a Sprint Planning meeting. The goal is that if you do not know about the completion of something you should not start it.

4. Backlog Grooming and Acceptance criteria

You should think that in a Grooming meeting, you list acceptance criteria for groomed matters, but don’t aspire for a 100% coverage. My personal opinion is that you should list at least 80% of the acceptance criteria in grooming. I have seen that stories are still “alive and well” during implementation and very often you come up with better solutions then, than during Grooming or Planning. Work is a great teacher. When you start building a matter – you often come up with much better solutions than when you are merely planning it.

This 80% rule means that the Product Owner is aware of stories which just started – I also talk about this in my book. For here I recommend a ceremony I developed, “Small discussions”. In this ceremony, when 10% of the story’s effort-length has been done, you will have a small discussion in which the PO asks what the developer has learned – was something difficult or did something about the story definition seem somewhat pointless. The objective is to come up with an even better solution. I have seen this approach lead to a better solution so many times that I can no longer keep quiet about this concealed weapon!

5. Preparation before Backlog Grooming

If the problem is the large size of the team or the quantity of the groomed matters, it’s a really good idea to entrust the preparation of the stories that need to be groomed, to a larger group. This should be done so that a couple days before grooming, the Product Owner shares the stories that need to be groomed, to the team and from there on either individually or in a small group (decide this yourselves) people will figure out what the stories mean, what are its acceptance criteria and what are its tasks, how it will be executed and is there any risks or need for refactoring…

When this has been done, you should return to your shared meeting and present your work to everyone, and you better not forget that conversation! This is how to save time from grooming itself and get more stories groomed.

6. Regularity

Grooming meetings should be held at the same time and remain about the same length every week. Most of the time one hour should be enough time to have this meeting (not including the preparations). This is worth sticking to. This one hour investment every week most definitely shortens Sprint Planning sessions and will improve the quality of your stories and execution.

7. Take testing into account

Testers and testability should be taken into consideration already in grooming. It is not enough that the testers or a part of them have been invited, you should also make sure that they attend. My experience is that some of the testers hardly ever want to open their
mouths and say something. So if you feel like the testers are not participating properly, the meeting host has to make sure that all participants get to say their opinions.

8. Practicing story-splitting in Backlog Grooming

Teams need to have an upper limit defined for how big stories are worked. Whether the limit is 13, 15 or 20 story points, that does not matter. But it is important for teams to set themselves a limit for when any story under this limit gets handed to them, they can most likely get it done well in a sprint.

Now specifically Grooming is the session, in which you should keep an eye on this limit – if a story is larger that the upper limit, you need to split the story. Splitting is somewhat difficult before you get a proper grip of it. So splitting should consciously be practiced. You can find multiple different models of splitting worth trying online. You should try this one or this one.

9. Effort estimates

It is not worth getting stuck on numbers in effort estimates. It is not essential whether a story is 3 or 4 points. I find it more essential to focus on hearing multiple opinions from more than one person based on the written description and acceptance criteria – if the estimates differ fundamentally, then it can be discussed about. Conversation is much more important than numeric values.

Sometimes we even recommend using S, M and L three-leveled classification. This can of course be applied to story points using three different values, for example 1, 5 and 13 story points. Anything bigger than 13 story points should be split and everything smaller than 1 story point is considered as 1.

Finally a couple of challenges

Here are few extra challenges for grooming sessions:

Think about future sprint-goals at the end of Grooming
Stop and think about whether you are missing something from the backlogs
Move a couple unnecessary stories to the trash on every Grooming session

With these three gimmicks you can clean many unnecessary stories, maybe also add a couple important things to the meeting that you might have missed and guide your thinking into matters that drive the content your future sprints.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of things to think about for a Grooming session to work out well. A good Grooming is fundamental for a working Scrum. I hope these tips helped you out with your Grooming sessions!