The Engineer's Complete Guide to Backlog Grooming

You might be an organized checklist kinda person, or you might be hopelessly unorganized like the rest of us. It’s generally not such a big deal until you get overloaded with tasks and your team grows, making things even more confusing as you can’t decide each day what to prioritize.

Fortunately, there’s a way forward.

In this article, we’ll look at:

1. What is backlog grooming?
2. Why backlog groom?
3. The role of Product Manager and Engineers in backlog grooming
4. Backlog grooming meeting: 

• How long should a meeting take?
• What should be the outcome?
• What do you do in a backlog grooming meeting?

5. Useful tools
6. Backlog grooming checklist

What Is Backlog Grooming?

Backlog grooming is one of those tasks or practices known by a bunch of other names. It's also called backlog management, refinement, pre-planning, or storytime, particularly by those who embrace agile or scrum methodologies. But you don't need to be into either of these practices to get what you need to know.

Backlog grooming is a process of regular meetings where you discuss, review, and prioritize backlog items. Backlog grooming aims to keep tasks organized and ready to be worked on at upcoming sprints. 

You're not spending time explicitly working on the backlog tasks but rather sorting and prioritizing these to ensure the order of completion and time spent aligns with the bigger company goals.

Why Backlog Grooming is Important?

Backlog refinement meetings are about communication. They keep the whole product team up to date and on the same page. This is important in large organizations, which may work on complementary tasks or tasks that rely on finishing other tasks first and hand over for overall completion. Without organization, backlog gets messy quickly and issues can’t be prioritized.

This creates a vicious cycle in existing backlogs (like Jira).

1. Issues are logged
2. Issues lack context
3. Issues can’t be prioritized
4. Backlog becomes overwhelming
5. Repeat

Pro tip: To decide what to put into your issue tracker, use Stepsize VSCode and JetBrains editor extensions. Stepsize allows engineers to create issues straight from their editors and link them to code. Visibility on key issues makes backlog grooming way easier and faster.

Backlog grooming is a great way to ensure clear ownership of tasks among different people or teams. Further, it removes the risk of scope creep by pairing back tasks to the most useful at any time.

It's not just about reporting what the dev team is working on, but an opportunity to get customer feedback (for example, customer queries, complaints, or logs during live demos). Backlog grooming keeps a company moving forward and makes it easier for product managers and owners to plan sprints and tick off tasks. 

Who Should Attend the Backlog Grooming Meeting? 

The product owner or product manager will most likely be the person who facilitates the backlog grooming meetings. These meetings need to be collaborative and cross-functional. 

Team members that represent different roles or functions should be present to provide their input. Specifically, I'm thinking of a representative or two from the delivery team, QA reps, and sometimes an engineering lead or manager.

You want representation, but you don't want too many people, or the meeting becomes unproductive.

The Role of a Product Manager and an Engineer in Backlog Grooming 

A Product Manager / Owner can be the cat herder, bringing the cesspit of procrastination to order: 

• Scheduling sessions and monitoring attendance
• Setting an agenda 
• Chairing the meeting to ensure that the agenda is on track and that the meeting moves forward instead of getting caught up dissecting a particular backlog item.
• Sending follow-up slack messages or emails after each session and monitoring tasks completion.

As an Engineer, you can make sure you collect all the data needed to address both feature issues and codebase issues, such as technical debt.

So What Do You Do in a Backlog Grooming Meeting? 

The most common tasks or user stories (I'll use these term tasks for ease) include:

• Removing outdated tasks.
• Adding new tasks
• Prioritizing tasks - including assigning them to specific people.
• Breaking urgent tasks into smaller deadlined tasks across several people.
• Identifying and addressing roadblocks to task completion. These can include dependencies where a bigger task cannot be completed until something else is handed over.
• Updating time estimates for each task. 

How Long Should a Meeting Take?

No one likes long meetings. Too easy to start talking about videos on YouTube or what everyone's having for lunch. Keep it short, ideally an hour at most, every couple of weeks.

What Should Be the Outcome? 

The product manager should leave the meeting with your next sprint or two planned and prioritized.

Overall, in product backlog refinement, everyone should leave with a feeling of shared understanding. This means that tasks are set, assigned and time estimated to align with bigger product or project priorities.  

Useful Tools

You'll see plenty of articles about product management and backlog grooming best practices that talk about using whiteboards, sticky dots, sharpies, and sticky pads. Ignore them, if possible.

Having a shared screen (heck, use a projector in a physical meeting) and a planning board is much more effective as no one needs to take notes later. 

The product person will be chairing the meeting, and it's hard to do this and take notes, so someone should help document. It's worth adding; you probably have the tools you need already -- no one wants another single task tool that integrates poorly.

But for great integration:

• Stepsize integrates with the issue trackers, such as Jira and Linear, to help engineers create, view, and link issues to code directly in their editors.
• Monday has fully customizable backlog templates to organize, manage, and prioritize items in one central space.
• Kanban boards can also be filtered by people, due date, progress, priority tags, etc.
• And of course, there's Jira. (Which work best together with Stepsize, of course)

Backlog Grooming Checklist

☐ Assign meeting owner.

☐ Set agenda and regular scheduling (e.g. fortnightly).

☐ Host meetings.

☐ Leave the meeting with clear deliverables including tasks allocation and due dates.

☐ Discuss codebase issues. It's easy to just focus on the next item to be shipped. But don't forget that sprints are also about maintaining a healthy codebase and managing legacy code.