Visualisation and Involvement (2) — Getting to Consensus
Focus Product Backlog Refinement on a desired outcome — Are we Sprint Ready?
We refined that already!
In a busy team with many small, medium and large features to discuss, refinement can be very challenging. I previously wrote about 10 Experiments with Product Backlog Refinement, and I guess that post gives some idea of the scale of the challenge with this activity.
This post is about another experiment, still in progress, but which so far is working quite well, and the experiment started as a reaction to a sentence that I was hearing around the team quite often:
“But we’ve refined that already!”
I felt we were seeing refinement as an outcome, not an activity. We had discussed a definition of ready (controversial perhaps!) but we were still occasionally getting to Sprint Planning meetings with disagreements over whether or not something was genuinely ready to start in a Sprint.
With inspiration from the Niko-Niko calendar, I sketched up a way for us to start thinking of a different outcome from Refinement discussions.
Is it Sprint Ready?
What outcome do we want from Product Backlog Refinement?
We’ve talked before about the pros and cons of a Definition of Ready here at Serious Scrum. With this team, it felt like we needed to shift the intended outcome of refinement discussions a little. Should we look for consensus on Sprint Readiness instead?
The question ‘Is It Sprint Ready’ prompts us to ask, with the information we have right now, do we know why we’re doing this, how to build it and how to test it? Do we all agree that we’re ready? In this system, everyone has a voice.
The visualisation above hangs on the wall around our team’s meeting area. We write the name of the ‘thing’ under refinement on the top row, and the names of the Scrum Team members refining it in the column on the left.
During refinement we refer to the usual materials: requirement documents, technical diagrams. We whiteboard up potential issues, or technical designs. We discuss how we are going to test this thing, and we make a list of open questions if we have any. We might update the backlog directly. We’ll also discuss task breakdown and estimates. A lot of ground to cover!
At the end of the discussion, we need consensus on one important issue: is this thing ready to start, or in other words ‘is it Sprint Ready?’
A green sticker means yes, a read means no. If we have one red sticker, then we know we still have some refinement to do.
Consensus
By asking for a commitment to Sprint Readiness, you assign ownership to the team. Are you sure you want to put that green dot on the sheet? Any last questions you want to ask? Haptic involvement with a visible outcome can translate into a little more involvement in the real world.
Still an experiment in progress, but it is proving interesting and involving for the team so far.
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