Story: Product backlog refinement
Table of Contents
This page documents a story in Sprint 18. It captures the goal, current status, acceptance criteria, and the tasks that compose it.
Goal
Equip every future session with two Claude Code skills and companion recipes — one for general backlog housekeeping (backlog-refiner) and one for sprint planning (sprint-planner) — so that backlog work is structured, repeatable, and recorded. As a first use of the new tooling, set sprint 18's mission and select its remaining stories.
Status
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| State | DONE |
| Parent sprint | Sprint 18 |
| Branch | feature/backlog-refinement-skills, feature/sprint-18-planning |
| Now | Completed 2026-05-24. |
| Waiting on | Nothing. |
| Next | None. |
| Last touched | 2026-05-24 |
Acceptance
- A
backlog-refinerskill exists underdoc/llm/skills/backlog-refiner/and is deployed to.claude/skills/. - A
sprint-plannerskill exists underdoc/llm/skills/sprint-planner/and is deployed to.claude/skills/. - A
how_do_i_refine_the_backlog.orgrecipe exists underdoc/recipes/agile/. - A
how_do_i_plan_a_sprint.orgrecipe exists underdoc/recipes/agile/. - Sprint 18 has a one-sentence mission and a populated Stories table with at least one additional story beyond those already in flight.
- The site builds clean after all new documents are committed.
Tasks
| Task | State | Start | End | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task: Create backlog-refiner and sprint-planner skills and recipes | DONE | 2026-05-24 | 2026-05-24 | Author the backlog-refiner and sprint-planner Claude Code skills and their companion agile recipes. |
| Task: Set sprint goals and select sprint 18 stories | DONE | 2026-05-24 | 2026-05-24 | Define sprint 18 mission and use the sprint-planner skill to identify and promote candidate stories from the backlog. |
| Task: Audit sprint 18 tasks: ensure all PRs have URLs and consistent format | DONE | 2026-05-25 | 2026-05-25 | Check every task in sprint 18 has a PR URL set and that all PR tables use the canonical [[url][#NNN]] format. |
Decisions
- Two skills, not one. General refinement (housekeeping, near↔far moves, culling) and sprint planning (goal-directed selection, promotion) have different triggers and outputs. Separating them keeps each skill focused and composable. The existing
agile-product-ownerskill handles atomic operations that both call into. - Recipes alongside skills. Skills hold the LLM orchestration logic; recipes hold the human-readable checklist and context. Both are needed so the process is transparent and the user can run it without Claude.
- Sprint goal-setting is part of task 2, not a third task. Goals are a precondition of sprint planning; folding them in keeps the task atomic and avoids a blocked state where planning cannot start.
Out of scope
- Changes to
agile-product-ownerskill (it remains the atomic-operation handler). - Backlog estimation or complexity-tagging (a future refinement pass).
- Automated backlog health checks in CI.