Using the Blocking and Tackling Backlog Refinement Pattern to Ensure a Great Sprint Planning

This post originally appeared on the PivotalTracker blog.

We’ve all had that sprint planning meeting. Your team spent the entire session arguing over which stories to include in the next sprint and you never even made it to sizing. By the time the session was over, you were no closer to having the next sprint planned and all that you’ve gained for your trouble is a frustrated and disheartened team.

If this sounds familiar, then it might be time to consider backlog refinement. Backlog refinement is a practice intended to help you keep the top of your backlog in a refined state so you can have better sprint planning sessions. But despite the value backlog refinement can yield, there is no officially prescribed approach for how to do it. However, if you’re looking for a simple way to introduce this practice to your team, then don’t despair: there’s an easy approach that you can use with your team today.

Blocking and Tackling Your Backlog

The *blocking and tackling* approach consists of two separate refinement meetings spaced evenly throughout each sprint. For example, if your team operates on two-week sprints, then you might hold the first session on the first Wednesday of the sprint and the second session on next Wednesday of the sprint.

Blocking

In the first session, known as *blocking*, your goal is to select the stories that you expect your team to work on in the next sprint. Your selected stories will be a function of both your planned goal for the next sprint and your team’s forecasted capacity for that sprint. If your backlog has already been prioritized so your most important stories are near the top, and these stories already have a rough estimate applied to them, then this process tends to be relatively straightforward. However, it’s still helpful to do this session with the help of your team for two reasons.

First, sharing more detail about your goal for the next sprint and which stories you believe will enable that goal helps your team better understand the bigger picture of what they are trying to create. This understanding will allow them to make decisions in the current sprint that will put them in a better position to accomplish the work selected for the next sprint.

Second, while your team will save their final estimates for the next sprint planning meeting, they can often share their impression of whether or not the work selected seems too large for the next sprint—or even too small. If it turns out that the work you selected isn’t quite the right fit, then you have the rest of the sprint to decide how to adjust your selection accordingly.

The rest of the session is saved for discussion. Introducing the stories you’ve selected to your team often leads to questions and discussions about alternative approaches...many of which you may not have considered. Surfacing these questions before the sprint planning meeting allows you to take time before the next refinement session to find the answers your team needs to confidently move forward.

Tackling

The second session, known as refinement, is where the real work happens. During this session, you will work with your team to further refine the selected stories to ensure that they’re ready for the next sprint planning meeting.

This session begins with you reviewing the selected stories for the next sprint to help refresh your team’s memory of what was selected. This is also a great opportunity to call out any changes that were made to your story selection to better fit your team’s forecasted capacity.

Next, take the time to provide any answers to questions you were unable to answer in the previous session. Not only does this help further refresh your team’s memory of their concerns regarding each story, but it also improves the chances of productive discussion later in the session.

Once you’ve answered any outstanding questions, give your team the opportunity to ask any questions that may have occurred to them since the last refinement session. Your team has now had several days to more thoroughly consider their approach to these stories; therefore, a few questions are to be expected. This is their chance to pose those questions to you before the deeper discussion begins.

Finally, the remainder of session is focused on ensuring that the selected stories are in a *ready state* for the next sprint planning session. Many high-performing teams already have a checklist in place of what they consider necessary for a story to be ready for discussion in an sprint planning meeting. The contents will vary, but at a minimum they often specify that a story must have a brief description of its objective, acceptance criteria, and a rough estimate. If your team doesn’t have a checklist of its own yet, then the INVEST criteria is a great place to start. INVEST specifies six qualities that are often associated with well-refined stories. Try comparing each of your selected stories against the INVEST criteria to see what gaps it exposes. After several sprints of this, you’ll likely start to recognize which qualities seem to add value to your team and which qualities do not. Once this happens, feel free to adapt the INVEST criteria to your own set of criteria that makes the most sense for your team.

Getting the Results You Need

Regularly holding backlog refinement sessions will result in smoother sprint planning meetings and, ultimately, more predictable sprints. However, the approach outlined above should be considered a starting point, so don’t be afraid to adjust this practice to better fit the needs of your team.

Regardless of how you ultimately approach backlog refinement for your team, what’s important is that your team is always ready to start the next sprint and that you or your team never have to suffer through a painful sprint planning meeting again.