Effective Backlog Refinement

Building, structuring and maintaining the backlog is a key task. Without tasks from the backlog, no sprint planning, no running increment, no results.

The maintenance of the backlog requires many skills and methods, including the classification of content according to complexity, business value, user benefit as well as the chronological order through prioritisation, estimations and dependencies. It must also be ensured that the individual backlog items are considered and evaluated equally and in the same way in order to establish comparability. The “backlog clock” supports us in such an equivalent and similar consideration and evaluation.

Like a normal clock, the backlog clock is divided into 12 segments, from 0 o’clock to 12 o’clock. Each hourly segment offers a method or procedure, or several in combination, to assess, evaluate and thus prioritise the entries in the backlog. The PO takes a Backlog item, whether it is a User Story, Epic, Wish, Note or Flag for something. He starts on the backlog clock at 0 o’clock and goes clockwise to the right to the first “time” (1 o’clock).

In this way, each Backlog item is equally assessed, processed and the business value is systematically worked out, which makes the implementation of the items clear and effective.