Grooming

The Scrum Guide now refers to refinement, rather than grooming.

It offers very few restrictions on how to do refinement, and it is described as such:

Product Backlog refinement is the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog. This is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate on the details of Product Backlog items. During Product Backlog refinement, items are reviewed and revised. The Scrum Team decides how and when refinement is done. Refinement usually consumes no more than 10% of the capacity of the Development Team. However, Product Backlog items can be updated at any time by the Product Owner or at the Product Owner’s discretion.

For example, one part of a team insists to have grooming only among developers.Other parts suggest that they all should participate

What should a scrum master do?

What should (s)he do? IMHO Maybe, be happy?



Team members that are active and genuinely wants to change their own process should be welcomed with open arms. Embrace those ideas, make them a tests and reflect on them after a couple of Sprints. Do those actions and changes help you be a better team and deliver valuable product increments with respect to DoD, quality standards, voice of stakeholders or not?



Be empirical in this and find your unique way, there are no silver bullets.

Sorry for stupid questions, but why some use the word grooming, while others the word refinement?

@Alfredo Alcantara  Grooming has negative meanings in some countries.  Plus the word refinement is actually more accurate to the activity.  

@Javid Valiyev  Refinement is the activity of making a Product Backlog item well understood by all involved in the work to address the problem stated.  If everyone is not clear what the item means, then it will usually result in waste of time and effort.  There are times that not everyone needs to be involved in refinement just as times that everyone should. The key to making refinement successful is making sure that everyone has access to the information uncovered during the activity.  And refinement is an activity not an event.  I have worked with teams where the majority of their refinement was done by entering/responding to comments in the ticketing system we used for managing the items. Other teams will only do it if there is a group of individuals gathered together.  The only "right way" is that all information discovered is available to everyone involved. 

What should a scrum master do?

Help the entire team understand and realize what refinement accomplishes plus the benefit of the information gathered for everyone. Let them decide how to actually conduct the activity in a way that satisfies the reasons.