Refinement as a quality enabler

As a software tester, I tend to think about testing when talking about quality in an IT context. I’ve written many times about my profession and often treated it as finding bugs in the software and verifying whether the product meets expectations. Of course, quality is about more than just the absence of bugs: it’s also about developing the right solution.

In Agile development the backlog items define what the teams will be working on. In general, these work packages start as a rough idea and will be split into epics, features and eventually user stories that are small enough to fit the sprint. Quality in the context of backlog items should focus on how clearly the items are described and how well thought out the solution is.