[teampractices] Grooming: ongoing and asynchronous

[Kevin Smith]

In a recent discussion[1], Quim said:

"Meetings support Grooming, not the other way around. Grooming is an
ongoing, asynchronous, remote-friendly activity open to everybody's input.
Meetings are synchronous and, in practice, leaning towards restrictiveness
and co-location (the problem of distance is being solved, but no tech will
get rid of timezone differences). Meetings are useful to push grooming and
resolve whatever the online grooming was not able to resolve."

I find this to be very intriguing and provocative. In our TPG glossary[2],
grooming is said to be an activity performed by the Product Owner, with
input from others. And that has been my own experience. Certainly other
people could email prioritization suggestions to the PO, but to me that's
not the meat of the grooming. Nobody but the PO should be moving things
around, right?

The actual act of moving things around seems like it is best done one
session at a time (not one item at a time). That way, the relationships
between tasks can be observed, and the backlog can be viewed holistically.
That leads me back to synchronous thinking.

This topic seems very relevant to the WMF, given our highly distributed
nature. If grooming can be done mostly outside meetings, that sounds great.
I would love to hear more from Quim on this as well as hearing opinions of
others.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Team_Practices_Group
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Glossary#Backlog_grooming

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation



*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20150617/19c0d48f/attachment.html>