Ask HN: Do you have refinement sessions too?

2 points by tkiolp4 2y ago ↗ HN

My team has one (sometimes two) refinement sessions per sprint (1 sprint = 2 weeks). What we do in these sessions is basically a mini-brainstorming about jira tasks that will go into the next sprint (plus assigning story points). Typically one engineer is on charge of presenting a jira task for refinement (usually a jira task is written by a product manager, but there are gaps and the assigned engineer needs to “fill the gaps” so that the whole team knows what the task is about).

We just got a new manager (ex faang), and he has introduced refinements in our sprints. I can’t but think these refinement sessions are huge waste of time.

3 comments

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eek2121 2y ago ↗

Oh boy....wait until you find out SCRUM is 90% meetings and 10% productivity...

ungreased0675 2y ago ↗

Yes, but it’s usually with the product manager and designer, maybe pull in an engineer if there are questions.

Pointing stories and thinking about what goes into the next sprint doesn’t sound like refinement to me. That sounds like a sprint planning.

withinboredom 2y ago ↗

We started doing these, and after a few months, I started advocating that only ONE engineer needs to be in there, instead of all 12 of us. If that engineer has a question that only someone else can answer, they can just pull us in (has happened ZERO times).

So, now we just send a sacrificial engineer to do refinement, usually picked by whomever did the fewest code reviews since the last refinement. It's actually worked too well. I get code reviews in 10 minutes instead of hours.