The scrum team, including the product owner, scrum master, and developers, attends the sprint planning meeting. Here are the definitions and responsibilities of each role as quoted from The Scrum Guide. Sprint planning is an exercise done to determine how work will be completed, based on what’s coming up in the product roadmap.
You can also use Friday for many other routine updates, such as a daily standup, one-on-one meetings, and weekly status updates. Asynchronous meetings occur between two or more people, but they don’t have to be present at the exact time or in the same place. The meeting is just as organized but doesn’t require an immediate response. We’ll continue to update this guide as we gain more agile planning insights, techniques, tools, and best practices. The advantages of remote work also bring challenges for collaborative planning.
Why run a sprint planning meeting?
Once you’ve prepared for sprint planning, it’s time to run the meeting. We’ve already discussed how to determine capacity based on rollover work, resource availability, and other factors, which are all important to running a successful sprint planning. Begin by reviewing the work completed in the previous sprint. If not, identify the amount of effort left on any stories or tasks that are rolling over. Taking these into account ensures you won’t overcommit to new work by approaching it as if you have full capacity (because you don’t). Scroll to the end to see a sprint planning meeting agenda template you can use as a cheat sheet when conducting your own sprint planning ceremony.
Sprint planning is done in collaboration with the whole scrum team. Sprint planning meetings help teams reach a shared understanding of what will be worked on during an upcoming sprint and how the work will be distributed among team members. By keeping the team’s interactions at the center of the project process, organizations are better positioned to achieve high-quality results. Most Scrum experts recommend either running a backlog refinement session prior to the upcoming sprint start or after the sprint planning session.
Determine which product backlog items to include
Sprint planning is a timeboxed working session that lasts roughly 1 hour for every week of a sprint. In sprint planning, the entire team agrees to complete a set of product backlog items. This agreement defines the sprint backlog and is based on the team’s velocity or capacity and the length of the sprint. Here, we’ll cover how to create a sprint planning meeting agenda that will ensure your project is moving in the right direction on the right timeline. During capacity-based sprint planning, there is no discussion of story points or velocity. The developers decide how much they can commit to by breaking product backlog items into tasks.
- Here are the main building blocks for your sprint planning meeting agenda.
- As with any goal, it should follow the SMART goal-setting framework, meaning it should be measurable and realistic, and provide a deadline by which to measure results.
- To help us make the most data-based estimation the teams use information from stakeholders and documents and reports in the company on the past experiences.
- The frequency of sprint planning meetings depends entirely on the organization but typically they happen every few weeks, or at least ahead of the start of each sprint.
Here are the main building blocks for your sprint planning meeting agenda. It’s important to mention that these specific events usually blend together into one free-flowing conversation instead of a specific set of steps. Once the team has a solid understanding of what tasks still need to be completed, it estimates how long it will take to finish specific items. These estimations can take the form of numerical ratings or any other rating system the team prefers, such as long, short, and medium designators.
Estimating team capacity in hours
The product owner and product manager (program manager) collaborate to write the user story. A complete Scrum process includes the sprint planning, the daily scrum, the sprint review and the sprint retrospective. Think of an ideal product as a machine, and the product backlog items as bolts and gears. To create a desired machine, we must 1) make sure the bolts and gears are in place, 2) they are properly lubricated. Like any good meeting, an effective sprint planning meeting needs an agenda.
The daily scrum or stand-up is an opportunity for a collaborative agile team to maintain progress. Post your sprint goal somewhere that is easily accessible so that the team can refer back to it throughout the sprint. As with any kind of meeting, the team can be easily sidetracked without a timebox. After all, talking about the work that needs to be completed is often easier than actually completing it. It’s the Scrum Master’s job to keep the team on track and make sure the time limit isn’t exceeded. The sprint retrospective gathers critical insights from team members about how the sprint went.
Who’s Coming to the Sprint Planning Meeting?
That will let team members know what to work on next if it happens they deliver on the sprint goals early. As a product owner or scrum master, the better you prepare for your sprints, the more likely you are to accomplish your objectives. You’ll build better software, that provides more value agenda for sprint planning to your customers. Some companies purposely don’t want developers to prepare for this meeting so they can look at the user stories with fresh eyes and without prejudice. These companies expect developers to read through user story descriptions and give some thought to the implementation.
In addition to your project management tool of choice, solutions like Otter can help by allowing you to record sprint planning meetings. Recordings and automated transcripts can be shared with absent team members or referenced later on if questions arise during the sprint. Agile teams learn how to overlap work and minimize the size of handoffs between team members. Despite this, some product backlog items will require a week or more of programming time before the programmer can give something even beginning to be testable to a tester. During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner describes the highest priority features to the development team. Go around the room and have each person share an update on work that wasn’t completed the past sprint and why.
Deepen Your Knowledge About Sprint Planning
To discuss the proposed velocity for this sprint, the story points and the team’s velocity in previous sprints should be considered. The team should https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ align on how many story points will be done this sprint. It’s best if this is stated clearly to the whole team to avoid unrealistic assumptions.
Practicing in sprints is a popular agile project management methodology, and it’s used quite often by software engineering teams. Sprint planning meetings help teams define goals, build alignment, and tackle projects collaboratively. They’re a foundational part of agile development, providing a space for teams to come together and plan before the upcoming sprint. However, even with the best plans and empirical data from previous sprints, scrum doesn’t make you clairvoyant. You can’t predict the future and the development team will likely hit roadblocks during the sprint. To kick off sprint planning, introduce any new members who might have joined since the previous sprint and state the purpose of the meeting.
Set your sprint planning meeting for a success
– Set milestones, key dates, and confirm the next sprint review and retrospective meetings. Just to make sure you don’t close out with any confused team members, offer a short question and answer (Q&A) period at the end of the meeting. Doing this in the group setting is helpful as it may answer questions that other team members had (or didn’t think of yet).