Attendees: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Agile team, and any needed Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
Activity: Review bugs, tasks, spike and split highest-priority PBIs into INVEST-able, Iteration-sized stories, refine their acceptance criteria, and estimate them.
Cadence: Every iteration, before the Iteration Planning or as required. (Note: these two ceremonies can be combined)
Approximate time: This is an ongoing activity, owned by the product owner, with a final meeting which usually takes 2 hours.
Inputs
Prioritized team product backlog.
Outputs
Refined Team Product backlog in which the highest priority product backlog items have been ranked, given clear acceptance criteria, and estimated, and are iteration-sized. There should one-and-a-half to two iterations worth of these high-priority, refined product backlog items.
External Team Dependencies outlined and communicated appropriately.
Team Backlog refinement is a regular workshop in which the product stakeholders (e.g., product owner) and technical authority (e.g., technical owner, technical lead, architect, or team) review the prioritized backlog and prepare it for the upcoming, relevant iteration planning meeting. It occurs both in single-team Agile Kanban and Agile Scrum.
As a result of the meeting, the highest priority items on the backlog are aligned with any vision, strategy, and/or release goals; (2) split to make them INVEST-able; (3) reviewed for correct and complete acceptance criteria and (4) given estimates (story points or t-shirt sizing), identify internal and external team dependencies. The output of this meeting (the refined team product backlog) is the input for the relevant iteration planning.
Also known as backlog grooming (deprecated), refinement of the backlog must occur regularly to ensure that the backlog items remain relevant and prioritized. Backlog refinement can be an officially scheduled on a cadence or an ongoing activity.
Goals:
Identify internal and external Team Dependencies
Remove backlog items that are no longer relevant.
Create new backlog items in response to newly discovered needs.
Re-assess the relative priority of backlog items.
For the highest-priority backlog items,
Align items with vision, strategy, and/or release goal.
Ensure that they have clear acceptable criteria.
Assign estimates (or correct estimates in light of new information).
Split items which are too coarse-grained to fit into a sprint.