Backlog Refinement Session Benefits

I always use Titanic journey through North-Atlantic as an example to explain the agile journey of product development and importance of product backlog. Product Backlog (an iceberg) is ever so little visible. If not handled with care, will lead to catastrophe.

Backlog Refinement (BR) session helps in building understanding about the iceberg, chop it bit by bit to make sure you know what’s coming and how to handle it. Scrum does not count BR as an event, but as an act of adding details, estimates and order product backlog Items (PBI). Basically bring clarity of what is required in future. Since Scrum does not prescribe anything on ow to conduct BR sessions, different teams follow different practices, most common being:

• Some do it once a week
• Some do it daily for 15 mins

But it should ideally depend on team agreement and velocity. Whatever be the arrangement, but it should not be skipped at any cost as an effective BR session will bring below benefits:

1. Results in effective Sprint Planning. Team looks the PBIs together thus have clear understanding of PBI, acceptance criteria, tasks which need to be done. This fast tracks sprint planning sessions and team productivity increases massively. Estimate accuracy increases and commitment to the goal is more firm then ever before.
2. Exposes hidden Complexities. It happens quite often in BR sessions that team identifies that a PBI is much more complex than originally thought and thus would take more time. So sensible approach is to break it further and then estimate it. This helps create consumable pieces of work with less dependencies.
3. Unearths the Unknowns. Team identifies areas where they have little knowledge or they think that the solution to the problem needs to be researched with a pilot/spike. BR session provides an opportunity to identify such cases early and decide next steps to cater such problems.
4. Uncovers Dependencies. Dependencies are inevitable, they can only be managed effectively through PBI split or combine, re-ordering. BR session provides the time for team to collaboratively work through best possible way to reduce dependencies and increases team's delivery speed thereby increasing velocity.
5. Promotes Team alignment towards Goal. Since the PBI is ultimately attached to the goal, thus early visibility of the items helps in building understanding of the product vision. A team who perform BR sessions regularly are more aligned to goal, work more collaboratively to add value to the delivery.
6. Reduces Technical Debts. Early visibility of what is to be build next always help bring clarity to create 'just enough, yet optimized' solution. Development team always have the future needs back in their mind while creating solution for current sprint. Thus subconsciously help developers to code better and solidify architecture.
7. Aid Forecasting. Along with historical data, a refined PB helps in forecasting or at least provide a range which can be communicated to the stakeholders. Sometimes funding is dependent on forecasting, also there are cases where organisations which are in agile transition phase need forecasting to feel confident and plan for unpleasant news.

In all, I see BR session as Empiricism in action, as the single source of truth (PB), which is visible to all, at all time is refined which helps in creating Transparency. Also sometimes PBIs might need split or combine, you might need a spike to decide what to do, reorder them to reduce dependencies, whatever you do, reflects a continuous process where the team Inspects and Adapts through discussions in BR session to implement a PBI in action.