Backlog refinement is an essential activity that keeps the product backlog in a healthy shape. The Product Backlog is owned by the Product Owner, who is responsible to maintain backlog in the right order with the help of the Development Team.
Read more : Product backlog and Backlog Refinement here.
There are many different ways to do the backlog refinement. However, with the work-from-home situations, it becomes hard for the Scrum Masters and Product Owners to get the desired focus of the entire team during refinement ceremonies. Additionally, it is hard for the Development teams as well to stay attentive to each detail over shared screens.
I found it as a threat to my own future sprints and also an annoying situation for the many scrum teams. However, luckily my disappointment did not last long, because I discovered the Three Amigos Strategy quite quickly and on-time.
Here I am sharing my latest secret recipe of relief with you.
The concept of the Three Amigos is not new to Agile. It has been making noticeable appearances and is being applauded by experts of our world for its remarkable results. Three amigos are three (or more or less) individuals from a scrum team who sit together to understand the focused backlog item(s).
The Three Amigos are
- Business Amigo
- Technical Amigo
- Quality Amigo
The Idea
The people representing each amigo, explore the backlog item from their perspective. They need not go into each detail of the work item yet. They collect only enough information which is required to get the work started.
During the refinement session, the three Amigos together present their findings. This gives the forum a wider idea about the refined stories as part of this activity.
Expected outcome
The three amigos work together with a shared focus towards —
- The business impact of the story.
- Customers and users of the story.
- Technical possibilities and challenges.
- Testing coverage.
- Dependencies/impact on internal or external teams.
These identifications leads the team into –
- Agreed scope of the story and acceptance criteria.-
- Open questions and suggestions to the stakeholders and other teams, if any
Recommendations
- Create possible tasks before the refinement session.
- Record all identified dependencies in the backlog item.
- If there are useful links then mention those in the notes or comments section of the backlog item.
- Attach all relevant documents and evidence of your findings.
In this way, you may have a focused refinement of identified backlog items effectively beating the challenges of the virtual office setup.
Feel free to drop in your opinion and suggestions, we are looking forward to hear back from you.
