The Product Backlog Refinement session is not an official Scrum event, but it is a crucial activity that helps Scrum teams to achieve a shared understanding of the product backlog items in preparation for the sprint planning. Teams that adopt the product backlog refinement as a complimentary practice tend to have smoother sprint planning events. The number of refinement sessions within a sprint depends on various factors such as the state of the product backlog, the maturity of the product, the Scrum team’s availability and experience.
The commitments contained in the Scrum Artifacts are arguably one of the important element of the Scrum Framework; these commitments when deployed as per the intentions of the scrum framework contributes to increasing the effectiveness of the scrum team.
I was asked to help out a Scrum Team that did not see much value out of a well-crafted Sprint Goal for their Sprints. In the sprint planning, the team would rollover every product backlog item (PBI) that was not completed in the last sprint, and the team would add a few more PBIs from their backlog on the ask of the team manager, who also attended the Sprint Planning regularly.
