3 Costly Backlog Grooming Mistakes That Waste Time
Stop “whole team” estimating.
The quality of a sprint is largely determined by how well planned it was.
This might seem obvious, yet we see teams trudge through a sprint with poorly described tasks, developers twiddling their thumbs when they run out of work, and no idea how to prioritize their tasks. The culprit? A backed up backlog that is the direct result of a poorly executed backlog grooming meeting.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Your backlog can work for you and your team with proper planning.
Here are 3 mistakes agile teams make that result in a painfully inefficient backlog grooming meeting.
1 | There’s no clear meeting facilitator.
You need to identify a meeting facilitator to put a stop to bike shedding and keep things moving forward.
Without a clear meeting facilitator, decision-making falls on the whole team, and having too many opinions, or lack of opinions, in the same room makes for an inefficient meeting. This indecision is exactly what causes the meeting to drag, wasting valuable time.
So how exactly does the meeting facilitator prevent circular technical discussion and solutioning? A technical meeting facilitator’s primary role is to add enough context for each task so that the developer assigned will know know enough to get started on the work. The facilitator keeps us on track by:
- Asking the right questions to build context.
- Collecting reproducible steps to help trace an issue.
- Logging any open questions that might affect the scope.
- Building consensus for the acceptance criteria of a piece of work.
The result of these steps is a task that has been reasonably scoped and is ready to be prioritized. When done right, we’ll avoid diving deep into a complicated Lucid Chart or trying to follow an ever-changing Figma design.
Once a task has been tagged, estimated, and described, it’s time to move it to the appropriate prioritized column and move onto the next one.
2 | There’s no clear directly responsible individual.
In addition to the meeting facilitator, you will need a task owner who can speak for a given task.
People will argue incessantly about the scope and priority of a given task when there is no clear owner. By having a clear owner, generally the person who has been working in that specific domain, everyone else can take a step back and offer advice if needed, and trust that their team mate who understands the problem at hand is the ideal person to answer for its details.
Yes, that means that you’re not doing “whole team” estimating. In fact, the estimation of effort for a given task (commonly pointed with numbers of the Fibonacci sequence) should be a conversation between the responsible individual, and the meeting facilitator, with everyone else feeling empowered to advise if an estimation feels off.
“But wait! Task estimations may vary based on the experience of the engineer!”
There is, however, very little variation between how engineers of different experience would point a 1-point task, as these are usually efforts that take less than a day. Similarly, but on the opposite end, an 8-point task only means one thing — it’s too big and can be broken down and better estimated. There’s usually little disagreement on 5-point tasks, as these involve some unknowns anyway. And for work that is adequately defined, these 3-point tasks are generally conservative 2-point tasks.
At the end of the day, task estimation is just that: an estimate. There is no need to die on this hill when the facilitator and the task owner can agree on an estimate and quickly move on.
3 | There’s no clear ending.
Backlogs are sometimes massive, and you could technically keep grooming a never ending list of tasks.
When you’re staring at a gigantic column of tasks, it can be demoralizing. This is why you have to define an objective that signifies an end to backlog grooming.
At Betterment, the Mobile Growth Team’s objective is to groom the New Tasks column, the inbox of every task we ever plan to do, and file the groomed tasks into the appropriate groomed column. The ideal meeting ends with an “empty todo list” satisfaction. On days with fewer New Tasks, the facilitator could decide it is a good time to revisit some of the previously groomed columns to verify if the work is still relevant. After already hitting the primary objective of an empty New Tasks list, revisiting groomed columns feels like you’re going above and beyond!
Alternatively, you should feel empowered to end the meeting early after reaching the objective, which is a huge mood booster and lets attendees leave on a positive note. Nothing feels better than efficiency! If there’s nothing more to say, the best thing to say is:
“Here’s some of your time back.”
