In team refinement sessions, conversation and collaboration are key. As a Scrum Master, I’ve witnessed hundreds of hours of refinement sessions. What I observe, across a wide range of teams, is often a member of the team (most likely a business analyst or product owner/manager) gathers requirements from a team on the fly, sharing their screen and typing the ticket details into the various components of the issue template.
For instance, a story typically has the description broken down into information, notes and acceptance criteria. The common next step is for the team to assign a story point to the item so that as it sits in the backlog, there’s an indication of the level of complexity it carries and that it is ‘ready for development’.
The reason why we assign story points is again to drive valuable conversations. In a scenario where one engineer assigns a 2 and another assigns a 5, this provides such a valuable prompt to dig deeper and enquire about why there is a difference. If you use the story pointing as a tick box exercise you are at risk of missing out on some key insights that may help the team further down the line.
Why this approach might not be effective:
- It’s samely. The repetitive nature might lead to people dreading the session, switching off/ multi-tasking or not attending.
- Is watching someone type a good use of the other participants’ time?
- The format requires someone to type and drive the session, leaving only enough bandwidth to write one line at a time.
- Therefore it limits the amount of PBIs the team might be able to get through.
- It favours those comfortable speaking up over quieter individuals.
- The traditional approach of scribing tickets and requirements during refinement sessions may not fully leverage the expertise of seasoned engineers. Instead of being presented with a solution, expert teams often thrive when confronted with a well-defined problem, allowing them the creative freedom to explore innovative solutions collaboratively. The act of someone typing out details in real-time might inadvertently limit the team’s ability to collectively contribute to problem-solving, potentially hindering the richness of their insights and collective intelligence.
How can we make the sessions more engaging and inclusive?
How we structure a session is key to the outcome.
- Design canvases using online tools such as Mural or Miro to encourage deep conversation.
- Using Likert scale questions gauges sentiment on various aspects. For instance:
- How sure are you that there are at least some unknowns to uncover on a scale of 1 to 10?
- How well do you understand the requirements of the PBI on a scale of 1 to 10?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how clear is the path to how we can test this PBI?”
- You could also use prompts such as ‘Is this complicated or complex work?’ with a dot vote so that you will be able to then fork off different approaches based on what the scenario might need.
- Use facilitation techniques such as 1-2-4-all from Liberating Structures to diverge and converge; to help with inclusivity and obtaining diverse opinions and comments.
- Think about neurodiversity and the different communication styles people on a team might have. Allow a varied format to help ensure that all preferences are catered for. There’s a wide range of options available, coming off mute to add to a conversation is only one. Virtual whiteboards as mentioned above are an option, the chat channel is another, and polls and survey tools such as Mentimeter are also great ways of being able to structure a session to be engaging.