Backlog Grooming Is Still Work
For many Scrum teams, “work” is what’s documented in the Backlog. If you’re like me, you can’t help but hear agile guru Jeff Sutherland’s famous remark that, “If it’s not in the backlog, it doesn’t exist” in your mind. But that’s not quite true. Even Scrum teams have work they should commit to as repeatable, maintenance-oriented tasks that occurs each and every sprint. One of the most important of these activities is backlog grooming. Ken Schwaber recommends that teams devote five percent of their time each week to this activity (about two hours per week). In spite of this mandate from the top, many Scrum team members continue to resist. The perception is that any work that deviates from one’s primary job function is extraneous . So software developers, for example, often hold fast to the idea that their time should be only spent writing code.
But here’s the thing: It’s all work. The work a team does each sprint to ensure that it can hit the ground running on its next set of sprint goals is no less essential to the team’s sustained performance. Even if it forces a developer to stop coding for two hours each week, what that “downtime” enables outweighs whatever code could have been written in the same amount of time. In short, this activity is like a pit stop for a racecar: A brief preparatory break that enables the team to keep going at full speed.
If team members are still reluctant to acknowledge grooming as part of their regular workload, then I’d suggest creating a repeatable story that can build this maintenance into the backlog each sprint.