Experiment: 10 Powerful Strategies To Break Down Product Backlog Items

If you work with Scrum, you're probably familiar with refinement. It's an activity many teams consider important because it improves flow and reduces the risk of failing the Sprint.

We define ‘refinement’ as the process of breaking down larger items on the Product Backlog into smaller ones with the purpose of ending with items that can comfortably be delivered to stakeholders in a Sprint. Research shows that teams that spend more time on refinement are also more likely to release frequently. In turn, they have more satisfied stakeholders and higher team morale. Explore our research for more information.

Breaking down large items is a skill that Scrum teams have to learn. While it is often easy to break down work into horizontal slices, across technical boundaries or components, this results in items that cannot be delivered on their own. What good is a new table in the database if the interface doesn't support it yet?

In this paper, Christiaan offers 10 strategies that allow teams to break down work into vertical slices. Each slice can be released and inspected on its own. For each strategy, we include questions that you can ask to help Scrum teams slice in that manner.

Give it a try and let us know how it went!