backlog-refinement
Backlog Refinement Expert
Overview
Refinement is the most under-invested ritual in agile teams. Stories arrive at sprint planning oversized, ambiguous, or strategically disconnected, and the team spends planning meetings doing what should have happened the week before. This skill is the refinement playbook: how to grade stories against INVEST, how to split stories vertically (so each slice ships value end-to-end), and how to keep a working Definition of Ready and Definition of Done that prevent half-baked work from entering or leaving a sprint.
The skill includes a Python scorer (refinement_scorer.py) that grades each story in a JSON backlog file against the six INVEST criteria and outputs a readiness score (0-6) per story. Stories scoring 5-6 are sprint-ready; 3-4 need targeted refinement; below 3 need to be reworked or returned to discovery.
This is a complement to wwas/ (the Why-What-Acceptance format) and job-stories/ (the JTBD format). Either format produces stories; this skill grades them and gets them sprint-ready.
When to Use
- Weekly refinement session -- Standard ritual: grade next-sprint candidates against INVEST and split anything too large.
- Backlog hygiene sweep -- Quarterly: re-grade the top 30 backlog items and retire what no longer connects to current strategy.
- Sprint planning input -- Before planning: confirm all candidates pass DoR.
- New team onboarding -- A new team needs a shared definition of "ready" and "done" to ship predictably.
- Velocity diagnosis -- If sprint completion is erratic, refinement quality is usually the cause; this skill is the diagnostic.