Who makes all the work on Product Backlog refinement?
Good afternoon, SCRUM community!
Need your advise.
I recently came across an issue stated in a header - seemingly, the refinement work is done by development team, since they drill down into the backlog items and slice and dice them to understand how they can implement. On the other hand, product owner provides the information and must accept the outcome, since she/he is the one and only who is entitled to do that.
So, ist it the effort of the whole Scrum team? (Scrum Muster also lurking somewhere in the picture :-)
Different teams do refinement differently, but regardless of how it's done, the actual refinement of Product Backlog Items is going to involve collaboration between the Product Owner and the Developers. The Scrum Master doesn't have to be directly involved, but there opportunities for involvement with respect to coaching on effective refinement techniques (on an individual, small group, or team basis), facilitating any meetings required for refinement, and helping to find and remove impediments.
The Scrum Guide says: "The Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required"
So if certain team members are not present in Product Backlog refinement, there nevertheless remains a joint team responsibility for refining the backlog in a suitable manner.
Specific accountabilities may have their own responsibilities in this regard. For example, "The Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing. The Product Owner may influence the Developers by helping them understand and select trade-offs."
Evene though the scrum guide states that its the PB is the scrum teams responsiblility, it only mentions that the developers do the sizing and the PO helps the developers with understanding each PBI.
This means that the SM is not mentioned.
The SM and PSK open assessments both have a question around refinement, and the answer is collaboration between the PO and developers. Again, the SM isnt mentioned, which means that although the scrum team may be responsible for the PB, it is not responsible for refinement as only 2 of its 3 accountablities take care of this (unless of course the SM is also wearing a developer hat during the sprint).
Thanks for the answers, lads. Appreciate it.
At my firm we mostly have the developers on the certain project and the product owner collaborate on managing the backlog refinement. We've found that it helps to have the product owner involved, or at least chiming in given they usually have a good idea of the long term roadmap for the project, and can help decide which stories should be made now.