What do you recommend a newly formed Scrum Team works on first?
The first critical issue for the majority of newly formed Scrum Teams is the existing legacy Product Backlog. Answers to this question need not reference Tuckman’s team development stages (see Question 28), additional team building exercises, or any kind of Scrum training or workshop not concerned with the Product Backlog.
It is a rare occasion for a Scrum Master to start from scratch with a brand new team and no existing product — even more so in a nascent organization like a startup. Most often, it’s an existing product delivery organization with existing products and services who will ‘go agile’. For these cases you should point out that refining the legacy Product Backlog is the practical first step.
The legacy Product Backlog per se is an interesting artifact because it provides comprehensive insight into the product delivery organization’s history: this particular Product Backlog allows for identifying organizational debt, process insufficiencies, questionable product decisions, and other anti-patterns.
Looking at a legacy Product Backlog, an excellent candidate will be able to point out some of these anti-patterns (e.g. outdated or poorly maintained tickets), and provide a good idea about how to transform the legacy Product Backlog into a well-refined, current Product Backlog such that a new Scrum Team could work with.
You should mention that running Product Backlog refinement workshops creates a good opportunity to provide a new Scrum Team and Product Owner hands-on training with Scrum. This is because a Product Backlog refinement workshop will typically cover user story creation, knowledge transfer among team members, the estimation process (if applicable), introductory agile metrics, technical debt analysis, and other topics critical to success of Scrum.
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