The purpose of the Backlog Refinement Meeting is to help the Product Owner get the top of the Product Backlog ready for the next Sprint Planning Meeting. The Product Owner cannot do this alone — the whole team must help. Remember Agile means business people and technical people working together daily. The Product Owner makes the final call about the requirements, especially prioritization.
Backlog refinement includes estimation of effort, clarification of requirements, and decomposition of large Product Backlog Items (often called “epics”) into smaller ones (such as “user stories”). A well formed Product Backlog Item is no bigger than one quarter of a Sprint. As Bill Wake recommends, each one should be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable. Converting large requirements to small ones, still representing business value, seems difficult at first, especially when the existing system is deep in technical debt. A skilled ScrumMaster can help the team identify thin vertical slices.
For more information about ScrumMaster responsibilities, please see An Example ScrumMaster Checklist.
For more information on the Backlog Refinement Meeting, please see Scrum Reference Card.
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