Do you have refinement sessions too?

Question

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 &ldquo;fill the gaps&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t but think these refinement sessions are huge waste of time.

withinboredom · Accepted Answer

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.

ungreased0675 · Answer

Yes, but it&rsquo;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&rsquo;t sound like refinement to me. That sounds like a sprint planning.

eek2121 · Answer

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