Agile: feature grooming
This course explains feature grooming through one example: a one-sentence ticket asking to fetch a partner's logo from their website. It counts the decisions hidden in the finished code and separates grooming from estimation, planning, design review and status meetings. It applies a set of questions that starts with failure. It covers vertical slices, estimate disagreement, facilitating a session, and writing a groomed ticket with decisions, out-of-scope items, unchecked acceptance criteria and open questions that each have an owner.
What you'll learn
- ✓Counting the decisions a one-sentence ticket hides
- ✓Telling grooming apart from estimation, planning, design review and status
- ✓Asking grooming questions, starting with what happens on failure
- ✓Splitting features into vertical slices
- ✓Facilitating a session and recording unknowns with owners and dates
- ✓Writing a groomed ticket and a definition of ready
Count the decisions
Grooming is easiest to understand backwards: look at finished code and count the decisions that had to be made before it could exist.
Read the full lesson free →Curriculum
7 lessonsCount the decisions
Reads an 86-line service built from a one-sentence ticket and counts the eleven decisions it contains.
What grooming is and is not
Separates grooming from four other meetings and defines its three outputs, attendees, timebox and inputs.
The questions that do the work
Applies seven questions, plus one about domain, to the logo feature, starting with what happens on failure.
Sizing and splitting
Splits the logo feature into vertical slices and treats estimate disagreement as a signal worth investigating.
Running the session
Covers the session's shape, four facilitation problems, handling unknowns, and writing unchecked acceptance criteria.
The groomed ticket
Walks through a full groomed ticket section by section and defines a short checklist for ready.
Putting it together: one hour
Replays one hour of grooming that turns the logo sentence into three items, decisions and open questions.