The "WTF does that do?" refinement technique

As I've said before, I love me a good refinement session. I loath an ineffective one.

This article is yet another method that you could apply to a refinement session if you find it applicable. Again I am not taking credit for coming up with this, but I also haven't ever had it suggested to me; it's an amalgamation from various experiences and jobs that I've done.

I used to be a QA analyst and this is an approach I used when I was trying to suss out acceptance criteria and was inspired by how wireframes were often given to us when I worked in a digital agency; and latterly reinforced by Jeff Patton's referencing of how Atlassian have "story walls" in their dev studio.

The scenario

Let me paint you a word picture. You're in a refinement session with a UI heavy piece of work and you need to agree what the behaviour of the UI elements are going to be (transitions, data sent on submission, how the page content might change etc) and generally how it's going to work...and what it's not going to do.

What could you do?

Stick the design on a portable whiteboard, gather round it and discuss every single element on the page and annotate it. In the image below you can see how we've got different parts of the journey and different views (desktop and mobile, other places I've worked included every breakpoint there was a difference [if they thought it was substantially different and therefore added value to do so]).

Through years of using this approach I've found the following good practices that have helped teams get the most out of it:

• Annotate with different colours for different things (questions, known behaviours, unknown scenarios, out of scope)
• Having a whiteboard you can take with you is really beneficial, but you can do this virtually with a tool like Miro (formally Realtime Board)
• The information produced here can be the start of your backlog items and acceptance criteria
• Be prepared to revisit this board over and over as you find more information out and answer the questions raised
• The verbal discussion really seems to bring out peoples passion and opinions, which we [hopefully] all appreciate the value of

Closing thoughts

User stories are promises to have conversations. You could generalise this and apply the idea to all backlog items/work item types in my opinion. The "WTF does that do" technique came about to help and support the conversation, giving it a bit more structure and making it a bit more tactile.

Let me know what you think, if you do it already or what you found when you took it for a spin.