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1. Backlog & Grooming
What Refining and clarifying backlog items so they are well understood and ready to be planned.
Owner Product Owner (backlog), Project Manager (process), with Developers and QA contributing.
Triggers Once per sprint, around mid-sprint, ahead of the next planning meeting.

Summary

Grooming (also called backlog refinement) is where the team turns rough requests into well-defined, testable, estimable work before anyone commits to it. The Product Owner owns the backlog and its priorities. The session ensures every candidate story has a clear description, acceptance criteria, and enough shared understanding that it can be estimated and built without surprises. The output is a prioritized, ready backlog feeding the next planning meeting.

Full detail

Cadence and participants

  • Frequency: once per sprint, around the middle of the sprint.
  • Duration: about one hour, time-boxed.
  • Participants: Project Manager, Developers, QA, Product Owner. Business Owner or CEO optional.

Before the meeting

The Product Owner (and PM where designated) ensures candidate stories already exist and are updated in the tracker. Going into grooming with empty or stale stories wastes the whole team's hour.

During the meeting

  1. The Product Owner explains the requirement behind each story.
  2. The team asks clarifying questions until there is shared understanding.
  3. QA specifically probes for testability: how would we prove this works, and what are the edge cases.
  4. Any missing detail is captured as an action for the responsible person to add to the story after the meeting.

Definition of Ready

A story is only "ready" for planning when it meets the Definition of Ready. At minimum it has a clear description, acceptance criteria, no blocking unknowns, and a rough sense of size.

Outcome

A prioritized, well-defined backlog. Each ready story has a description, acceptance criteria, and appropriate labels, and is mapped to the relevant JIRA Release.

flowchart TD
    A[Raw request or idea] --> B{In backlog?}
    B -->|no| C[PO creates story]
    B -->|yes| D[Grooming session]
    C --> D
    D --> E[PO explains requirement]
    E --> F[Team asks clarifying questions]
    F --> G[QA checks testability]
    G --> H{Meets Definition of Ready?}
    H -->|no| I[Assign action to fill gaps]
    I --> D
    H -->|yes| J[Story marked Ready & prioritized]
    J --> K[Feeds Sprint Planning]

Example

Story ABC-1042, "Allow customers to export their order history as CSV." In grooming the PO explains the business reason (customers asked for it for accounting). A developer asks whether exports are synchronous or emailed for large accounts. QA asks what columns are guaranteed and how date formats are handled across regions. Two unknowns are captured as actions for the PO. The story is not marked Ready until those answers are added, so it does not enter planning half-defined.