Backlog Refinement
My Scrum team does Backlog Refinement once per week as a whole team.
I've seen another team basically volunteer for one story each and refine them individually, document findings, and present back their learnings at a team refinement meeting. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I just haven't seen it done like this before. I've always thought of this activity as a whole-team activity, or at least with the PO and team member to ensure its conversation focused.
I'm wondering, have you ever used the 2nd approach, or a different approach perhaps? Is the whole team really needed?
The whole team needs to reach a joint understanding of the work involved, to the point that it can be given a team estimate and potentially planned into a Sprint.
It may be reasonable for individual team members to report back with findings. One or two of them might conduct a spike investigation, for example. That's a common enough scenario.
I have seen it for doing some investigation but not as a general practice for each PBI.
The ultimate purpose of Refinement meeting is the collaboration between PO and Dev Team for adding more details, estimates and ordering of PBIs.
The entire Scrum team decides How and When to do it.
Isolating story for individual will just contaminate the scrum environment eventually leading to failure as individuals will be held responsible for failure of a sprint goal instead of the team working together as a single unit.
It might initially look working for couple of Sprints, but the result cannot be called as Scrum.
Even i observed in some scrum teams PBI refinement done with individulas
but it really leads to failure
b'coz only that US developer and PO will be involved
In a scrum frame work , scrum development team is responsible for the US or task not an individual..
but definitively this is not a best practise...