Firstly, the Product Owner is responsible for determining the overall priority for each Project Requirement. The product owner must only review the highest priority requirements, everything else can then wait. Refining requirements will then occur at various stages of an Agile project. The typical refinement times would be when creating the product roadmap, when creating the product release plan and when creating the sprint plan.
Product Roadmap
The Product Roadmap describes how the product will line up with the Stakeholder Requirements in the future. It details the highest priority features to be developed and may also be subject to change as the Product and Stakeholder Requirements change. Features at the product roadmap level are typically large and generating themes of related functionality can be achieved by combining closely related features.
Release Plan
The release plan is a high-level timetable for releasing a set of Product Requirements. The release plan requires the features described in the product roadmap to then be broken down into short user stories. These user stories may either involve multiple actions in the form of epics, or they may be just a single action. The plan also describes the minimum viable product that will be released to the market.
Sprint Plan
At the start of each Sprint, the Scrum Team break down the release plan stories into small user Stories and Tasks to be completed during the spring. The user stories should, therefore, be small enough to enable fully developing them within a single day. Note however that estimating tasks is done in story points and estimating is not a time estimate. Furthermore, the Scrum Team creates the Sprint Backlog with these user stories detailing all of the work required to be completed within the Sprint.
Requirements Processing
Processing requirements then follow a seven-step procedure:
- Requirement Definition
- Design
- Development
- Testing
- Integration
- Documentation
- Approval
Following these seven steps, the product owner is responsible for approving the done work and is then shown to the product stakeholders.
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