Scrum Artefacts: Product Backlog

The Product backlog is a set of all baseline requirements prioritized in order which is made available by the Product Owner to the Scrum Team. The product backlog emerges and evolves over time and the Product Owner is responsible for its content and validity.

The Product backlog is a living artefact that may be subjected to change, when there is a change in the external business environment, market conditions, regulatory changes or technology changes.

Scrum teams work on the Product backlog and create a potentially shippable product increment.

Product Backlog maintenance, also popularly known as Backlog grooming, is an informal Scrum team ceremony that happens every sprint, in which everyone in the team, including Scrum Master and Product Owner get together to ensure that work items in the backlog are relevant and useful, and each items aligns to the overall product roadmap. It is indeed more of a working session than a typical closed door meeting.

Typical activities during the backlog refinement are:

  • Reviewing  the highest priority stories on the top of the backlog
  • Ask questions to product owner for more information.
  • Deleting stories that are no longer needed
  • Writing new user stories
  • Re-prioritizing and force ranking the stories
  • Re-define the acceptance criteria
  • Creating new user stories when necessary
  • Estimating or re-estimating stories
  • Re-assessing the relative priority of stories
  • Breaking the epics further into user stories
  • Refining stories to prep for future sprints
  • Understand the changing bigger picture of the product architecture as the backlog emerges.
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