The situation

The agile team was working in a still mostly project-based environment. Over the period of several months, they had created backlog items, both with nice business value and also items to get rid of some technical debt they had piled up, getting to a situation where they had about 125 backlog items, of which only a dozen were estimated and refined, ready for the next 1,5 sprints, “as Scrum prescribes”.