Grooming

Scrum doesn't give a clear cut idea on grooming which is actually one of the most important practices in an agile project.  A well groomed product backlog is one of the basic tenants for a successful agile project. From a well groomed product backlog you can pull out stories to a sprint and comfortably complete the implementation with less uncertainties.

Unfortunately most projects in the initial stages have a tendency to use product backlog to push stories into the sprint without a proper grooming more due to ignorance. We are agile so we don't want to spend too much time on grooming. Once the story is picked into the sprint and when worked on we will discuss the details. The problem is that if we start learning what needs to be done while working on a story the is likely hood that there will be scope creep. Working on the details will expose more questions and might even end up in the story not being completed or completed without the whole business value or quality and overall trust on the team will be effected. You don't want to spend the sprint to be used to figure out the business need and struggle to keep up to the commitments. This more sounds like waterfall model inside a sprint, ie first find the requirements, develop the code and then put it for testing. If the business is not reachable within the sprint it will add more problems. If there are external project dependencies it gets even more difficult.

If we can apply grooming the right way which is to 1) discuss the story first to find out if it is the right story in terms of priority, test ability and feasibility. 2) if it is in the right size and priority then discuss the acceptance criteria in terms of a common understand by 3) bring out the scenarios that can be used to define the scope and help define the defenition of done based on acceptance criteria so the team now only needs to pull it into the sprint and work on the implementation details.

How can this be achieved. It is very important that the team understands the business need of the story. Spend about 10% of capacity of the current sprint to groom stories for the next sprint. Grooming will include Identifying the user and need for the story to the business and the scenarios that will define the story to be done based on the acceptance criteria identified for the story. This will reduce the time on planning and help estimate tasks for a story.