A backlog grooming (or backlog refinement) session is a recurring meeting in Agile development methodologies like Scrum. Its primary purpose is for the development team and the product owner to review, discuss, and refine items in the product backlog. This involves clarifying requirements, breaking down large user stories (Epics) into smaller, more manageable stories, estimating the effort required (e.g., using story points), and ensuring that items at the top of the backlog are well-understood and ready for an upcoming sprint. The focus is on the detailed preparation of user stories and their associated tasks.

A. Review the Epics and meet the cross functional team: While reviewing Epics can be part of grooming, the focus is on breaking them down into ready user stories. Meeting the team is typically a kickoff activity, not a recurring grooming task.

C. Review the high level design document and ask questions: A high-level design document is an input to the backlog grooming process, providing context. The session's activity is not to review the document itself, but to refine the backlog items (user stories) derived from it.

D. Update support tickets that have been sitting for x number of days: This describes a support or operations-focused task. While bugs from support tickets may become backlog items, the grooming session is for planning future development, not managing active support queues.

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1. Bjarnason

E.

Wnuk

K.

& Regnell

B. (2011). A case study on challenges in creating shared understanding in large-scale requirements engineering. Information and Software Technology

53(7)

675-690. In section 4.2

"Product backlog grooming

" the authors describe the activity: "The product backlog grooming meetings were used to discuss

estimate

and break down requirements into smaller pieces." This directly supports the activities mentioned in option B.

(DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2010.09.006)

2. Lucassen

G.

Lammers

T.

& van der Werf

J. M. E. (2016). The use and effectiveness of user stories and a-priori mock-ups in practice. 2016 IEEE 24th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

174-183. The paper discusses backlog refinement as a key practice where user stories are detailed: "During backlog refinement sessions

the product owner and development team discuss user stories to clarify and estimate them." This aligns with the detailed review and update of user stories.

(DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2016.29)

3. University of California

Berkeley. (n.d.). CS 169A

Software Engineering

Lecture 4: Agile/Scrum/XP. Courseware. The lecture slides describe the Product Backlog Refinement process as including activities such as "adding detail

estimates

and order to items in the Product Backlog." This directly corresponds to reviewing and updating user stories in detail.