Sprint Planning in Agile

As the name suggests sprint planning is an event where the scrum team participates to come up with ‘What’ they will be delivering in this sprint and ‘How’ will they achieve this goal.

This Article covers topics:

• Sprint Planning Meeting Agenda
• Sprint Planning Meeting Duration
• Sprint Planning Meeting Preparation

This meeting is facilitated by scrum master, other participants are product owner and the scrum team.This meeting is to identify which user stories will be part of this sprint and what all will be done and by whom in order to complete them.

Any user story will be considered as completed only if it meets the ‘definition of done‘ criterion. These criterion are pre-defined by the team and the product owner. If the team is mature and self organised it knows its potential and based on its velocity commits only what seems feasible to achieve. What work to be done is suggested by product owner mostly prioritised by MVPs.

The deliverables of sprint planning meeting are sprint backlog and sprint goal.

Sprint backlog is a prioritised list of user stories(work) derived from product backlog that you will be doing in this particular sprint and sprint goal is what depicts the aim of this sprint for example ‘Go-Live for Customer A’

All meetings should have an agenda to keep them on track and focused and the same holds true for sprint planning meetings as well.Below are few Agenda items:

• Confirmation on the availability of scrum team members: Team needs to be vocal about their leaves and days they will not be available so that internal planning can be done accordingly to make sure team makes veracious commitments.
• Goal of the sprint: There should be a goal to be achieved during this time-boxed sprint for example team makes a commitment to complete a feature called ‘TicketBooking’ so that it can be delivered to the customers to be part of system ‘XYZ’.
• Potential backlog items for discussion : Discuss through each item which can be part of your upcoming sprint for example what is it all about , is the acceptance criteria well defined , is the definition of done known and what could be its estimate. 
• Last sprint’s spillovers : Team needs to decide if anything not completed in last sprint needs to be worked on in this sprint.

Timings of sprint planning meetings should be well-defined and clear to all. Scrum master should keep a check on timings and help the team to be effective within the time frame allotted. 

As per scrum guide:

With a general rule of not more than 2 hours planned per week.

PRO TIP: Do backlog grooming connects on regular basis with your product owner. Having a connect every week with product owner will help you to maintain the product backlog such that it is well prioritised. Bigger pieces of work like Epics are divided into smaller ones like user stories and user stories are ready to be worked on. Eventually your sprint planning meetings will be more organised and hence will be completed on or even before time. 

In scrum all the meeting events are not a single person’s responsibility. Sprint planning meetings are facilitated by a scrum master and attendees are product owner, scrum master and scrum team. Sprint planning meetings should be run by team and no one should be forcefully directing the meeting. Thus we can rightly say that sprint planning meeting is a collective responsibility of the scrum team, product owner and scrum master as they provide a collaborative commitment for deliverables.

Let us now discuss what preparations participants can do at their end:

Scrum Master: Should send the invitation with meeting agenda. Needs to make sure that user stories to be discussed are not vague and are following the INVEST principle. 

Scrum Team: Needs to provide their best on estimations. Should read about their product roadmap. 

Product Owner: Should have the data on what are customers top priority items. Should have a well-defined acceptance criterion for each user story.

Summary

Sprint planning meeting is to plan just for the next sprint and should be time-boxed, crisp and effective.

• Have regular connects on Backlog Grooming.
• Avoid letting meetings go off track.
• Have your team go through what is the near goal of your project this can be achieved by going through epics defined for the versions you are working on.
• Do consider holidays, leaves and mandatory trainings while planning the work team can do.
• All team members should be fully involved and should participate enthusiastically as they own the sprint they are doing the planning for.

Learn how to do Sprint Planning using JIRA

Happy Planning ..