Progressive Refinement at Scale: Useful References

  James  1 min read.

Article on Cross-Team Refinement by Rob Maher and Patricia Kong

  • The approach I described in the book provides a little more formalization, which should prove helpful when coordinating across a larger group. In other regards, it is roughly identical to the process described by Rob Maher and Patricia Kong.

Visualizing the Nexus Sprint Backlog, by Rob Maher and Patricia Kong

  • This article is closely related to their “Cross-Team Refinement” article and resonates with my “Sprint Alignment Wall” chapter.

Backlog Grooming Bugs Me, by Jeff Patton

  • Jeff Patton talks about boring, unproductive refinement meetings and how to avoid them. Jeff Patton and Roman Pichler have long been the go-to references for guidance regarding product ownership.

Tips for Effective Backlog Grooming, by Charles Bradley

  • Charles provides an excellent set of tips for effective backlog refinement. I don’t remember ever disagreeing with anything Charles has said or written. Like me, Charles is—or at least once was—a hard-core software engineer and so speaks from real-world experience.

Reasonable Scaling Frameworks

Nexus and LeSS are very similar to each other, and largely codify behaviors and structure that mature large-scale Scrum teams have been employing for years.

Scrum.org Nexus

LeSS