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Refinement - For Development

Refinement - For Development

GOAL: Add clarity and details to a story to minimize rework, avoid risk, and enable a more efficient development process.

Audience: The whole product team.*

Preparation

  1. TPO refines the story to the best of their ability

Meeting Agenda Summary

  1. The story is reviewed

  2. The team comments and adds details until the story is ready to be pointed

  3. The team points the story

  4. The story is marked as Ready and optionally assigned to the person doing the work.

Assumptions

  • Product design teams provide high-fidelity design artifacts.

  • Teams are able to critically analyze the preliminary content the TPO creates.

Overview

Refinement aims to add clarity and details to a story to minimize rework, avoid risk, and enable a more efficient development process. Good patterns for refinement balance:

  • Efficiency and Engagement—You don’t want to take up everyone’s time by having them watch someone type. At the same time, you want folks to think critically about what needs to be done.

  • Details and Autonomy - You need alignment but also want to enable creativity and learning as folks do their work.

Context and Assumptions

This document is for Development Refinement. It assumes that high-fidelity and vetted designs exist and need to be implemented.

NOTE: Working in this way can be less than optimal (high-fidelity designs turned over to development to implement). There are many other patterns that can work:

  • Design and development subtasks

  • Building low-fidelity working-applications first, then incrementally layering in design

However, pipelined work in design and development is very common.

NOTE: Bitovi assumes our TPOs are rather technical and can identify gaps in the design work and sometimes architectural considerations.

Preparation

Ahead of the refinement meeting, the TPO will refine stories to the best of their ability. The TPO will have the designs and be able to write acceptance criteria and other supporting artifacts (including developer notes).

The TPO will know what they need to refine because those stories should be in the upcoming sprint and also in the REFINED status.

 

Meeting Agenda

  1. The TPO reviews the stories to be refined.

  2. For each story:

    1. The story is reviewed. Any team member can weigh in on any aspect of the story.

    2. Once the team feels the story meets the Definition of Ready and is able to be pointed, then:

    3. The story is pointed (Story Pointing - Fibonacci Time Points), including considerations from the Definition Of Done.

    4. The story is marked as Ready and optionally assigned to the person who will take on the work.