Backlog Grooming (aka Backlog Refinement) 

• Lead: Mary Jo Kochendorfer (Deactivated) and/or Team Leads

• Product Owner, Team Leads + chosen team members, Scrum Master(s)

• No more than 2 hours 

• Objective: Review the high-priority tickets and/or discuss what the next sprint should focus on. The product owner will highlight the functional priorities and the tech leads will highlight the technical priorities.

• When:

  • Team VR:

  • Team JSI:

  • Team Ona:

  • Team Parrot:

• Meeting Invite: OpenLMIS v3 Backlog Grooming.ics

Process Details:

• Backlog grooming is most likely to succeed when the following have been accomplished prior to the meeting:
  • The Product Owner has defined the functional priorities for each team for the next sprint. These are marked in bold within the particular team's section.
  • The team has created tickets in Jira with sufficient detail that relate to each functional priority.
  • The team lead has curated these tickets and linked to them in the "Backlog Grooming Sprint NN" page each ticket should have a checkbox next to it
• During the meeting:
  • Product Owner outlines functional priorities and the team discusses any conversations that are jotted down per functional area
  • Review each ticket that is proposed by functional area
    • Determine if the ticket is scoped well enough and if there are any dependencies that aren't accounted for
  • Develop a roadmap of gaps that need to be completed in the backlog before the next sprint can start
  • The team prepares for the Planning meeting where story points and estimates are defined.

Backlog Grooming Page Sample

This section displays a subset of the backlog that was completed for Sprint 47:

Vaccine Stock Based Requisitions

• A:  (MUST)
  
• (MUST)
• Q:  (MUST)
  

Fulfillment

• Q:  (MUST)
• (MUST)
• 
  • Fulfillment current Integration Test approach slows developers down

Items to note:

• Each functional area is in bold
• Each ticket has a checkbox next to it representing a task
• One item without a checkmark means that this ticket was considered, but not picked up by the team.
• The priority defined by the Product Owner is in parenthesis (MUST) to signal to the team leader that this is critical.
• The "Q:" signals to the Product Owner that this issue has a question that needs to be addressed before the sprint beings.
• The "A:" signals to the Team lead that the Product Owner has responded in the ticket.

Meeting Notes