Grooming the Product Backlog

A fundamental activity of release planning is grooming the product backlog to meet our value and quality objectives. During envisioning (product planning) we create a high-level product backlog (perhaps with epic-level stories) and then use it to define a set of minimum releasable features for each release. Many of these backlog items are too large to be useful during release planning.

For example, during SR4U envisioning Roger provided a rough idea of which high-level features would be available by the Social Media Expo. Let’s imagine that his roadmap indicates that Release 1.0 will focus on “basic learning” and “basic filtering” features corresponding to the following backlog items:

As a typical user I want to teach SR4U what types of reviews to discard so that SR4U will know what characteristics to use when discarding reviews on my behalf.