We had 4 squads (sub-teams) one backlog and an excellent Product Owner who made decisions on the spot when required, and also give the grooming sessions plenty of her attention.

We did however arrive at some tips that may help others in the grooming sessions.

We found that too many people in one session was more than 5 active participants in the conversations (sometimes more people were in the room – but typically more as observers, rarely involved in the debates).

We found the PO frustrated by the development team rotating people in the sessions. The lack of continuity was the cause of frustration, as we would often go back to past stories and a new dev. member of the group would not have the context for the discussion. We resolved this by rotating on the sprint boundaries rather than the meeting boundaries. The desire to rotate which developer attended the grooming session was a team desire, the PO wanted the same people each session. The team felt that exposure to the backlog was a team responsibility that had to be shared, not shouldered by a few select members.

Our Business Analysis were frustrated by the constant writing and rewriting of stories and splitting and combining of stories. There was a good bit of churn, and as everyone has a belly-button, everyone has an opinion of how to split a story! But they soon learned that just the minimal information was required and that it took viewing the stories in different context and that this was not requirement gathering – but indeed product design that was happening right before their eyes, and they played a part of it!

We rarely got a story right! That is at the grooming session. We allowed that the story would be better understood at the planning game, and even better after work had progressed for a day or so. Therefore the BAs took on the responsibility for documenting the negotiations in the story for the acceptance criteria that the PO and Team made on an ongoing basis. This is important – no one can remember after a month why the story was acceptable with such-and-such a limitation, but the story if updated with the negotiated criteria can act as a “as-is” documentation – remember to record these or you will have a brewing misunderstanding on you hands.

As such, we’ve found it works best to spread out grooming. Typically, with a two-week sprint starting on Monday and ending the following Friday the best time to groom without interfering with sprint start and end is Tuesday and Thursday. Hence, we groom for an hour each Tuesday and Thursday. Occasionally we’ll schedule an additional session or two, but typically 4 one-hour sessions (along with the planning session) have been sufficient to prepare enough stories for a two week sprint.