Let's assume a common context of Story tickets in Jira being discussed in a Refinement session.
What kind of input can you, as a member of the team, give to make this ceremony worth the time?
If you can't surmise the answers to these questions from the ticket, ask them aloud:
Justification
- What value will users get from this?
- Is it worth the opportunity cost?
- Is this an idea we want to prototype or a request from paying customers?
Measuring success
- After release, how will we know we achieved the expected value?
- Will we beta test this change through a dark launch?
Specifications
- What does [unclear acceptance criterion] mean?
- Could we rewrite [unclear acceptance criterion] as [better wording]?
- Could we clarify [free text specifications] through a scenario outline table, through Gherkin DSL, and/or through representative examples (Specification by Example)?
- Have we covered all relevant happy path scenarios?
- Have we covered all relevant unhappy path scenarios?
Readiness
- If we tried to start this today:
- would there be any dependencies or blockers?
- would we need to complete any investigation (spike) first?
- do we need any alignment with:
- the support team who will write help centre articles for this?
- the marketing team who will update marketing materials for this?
- the translation team who will provide translations for this?
- could we benefit from whiteboaring and deciding a technical solution?
- would we have all supporting documentation (e.g. lofi UI/UX designs in combination with a UI component library) available?
Testability
- To test this, do we need:
- a special test environment and/or mocking solution for a third-party integration?
- production-like test data which we do not currently have?
- instrumentation which we do not currently have?
- to provide the ability to change the application's state?
- to expose one or more custom data attributes?
- Which scenarios are we going to cover at the level of an isolated unit test, which at the level of a sociable unit, which at the level of an integration test, and which through a UI-level test?