Sprint Planning¶

Definition: Sprint planning is a meeting held by the scrum teams with the intention to select a set of prioritized items from the product backlog to be delivered during the current sprint.

Rules

• The product owner, the scrum master, and the entire scrum team are required to take part in planning. To make this possible, sprint planning is a timeboxed event — it has a set length of time that all participants agree to attend.

• During the sprint planning, the product owner presents a rough idea of the scrum team’s goals, including features to be added or improvements required to the existing system. Then they present the highest priority items from the product backlog.

• Together, the members of the development team determine which product backlog items each of them will build and how they will resource this during the current sprint.

The sprint planning meeting is comprised of how many sections?

The sprint planning meeting consists of two parts. In the first part the product owner shares the sprint vision with the team and presents the backlog for the sprint. In the second part of the sprint planning event the team meets to discuss how the Priority Backlog Tasks should be decomposed into developable tasks.

What spring planning is used for?

1. Prioritization: The product owner, scrum master, and the development team use sprint planning to discuss and select the prioritized items in the product backlog.

1. Feasibility: The development team reviews the technical aspect of each item and decides how feasible it is to develop them during the current sprint.

1. Communication: development team also completes detailed planning of the backlog items, by breaking down the user stories into individual development and testing tasks.

1. Comprehensibility: The team members estimate the size of the user stories or story points using scrum estimation techniques such as planning poker. This provides an estimate for each task they have selected.

Allocating User stories & Sprint Velocity

Using the established Sprint velocity estimate and other requirements provided by the product owner, the Scrum Master then works with the team directly to allocate work to each new Sprint.

By allowing the team itself to function autonomously, one of the key benefits of Agile development can shine: the self-directed Agile team organizes itself for each Sprint matching the necessary work with the most effective team members to handle those tasks. Not only does this mean the right people will be doing the right things during the Sprint, but the team members will feel a higher level of accountability for successfully completing these tasks since they were empowered to assign them out as a team.

Define Done:

When adding user stories to the team’s backlog, defining the acceptance criteria is a key part of the process. What does it mean for a user story to be complete?

• Are stories well-defined by the product owner, designer, and the engineering team before implementation?

• Are there clear definitions and requirements around code review, automated testing, and continuous integration to encourage sustainable, agile development?

• After the team completes a story, are there many bugs that surface? In other words, does ‘done’ really mean ‘done?’

Advantages of sprint planning¶

An effective sprint planning meeting gets the whole team aligned on what needs to be done, when and by whom.

More specifically, the benefits of sprint planning include:

• It provides a communication platform for the development team: During the sprint planning, the team members get the opportunity to identify their dependencies, capacity to set achievable goals and plan their tasks to achieve them during the current sprint.

• It helps to prioritize the deliverable: The product owner prioritizes the backlog with the most important items at the top. Then the scrum team selects the items from the prioritized backlog and breaks them down into smaller tasks. This way the most important features of the system will be delivered in early sprints.

• It avoids team burnout: The team members themselves select achievable goals for the current sprint based on their capabilities and estimations. This avoids a third party, such as the project manager, setting unachievable and/or unnecessarily stressful goal posts.

Disadvantages of sprint planning¶

Of course, there are some watch-outs associated with sprint planning. And even with the best of intentions, the planning process can backfire:

• Poor estimations can lead tasks to failure: The tasks for the current sprint are selected by the development team based on their best estimations on the workload and their capabilities. If a task is poorly defined or estimated, they might not be able to complete it during the current sprint as planned in the sprint planning session.

• Sprint planning requires a good knowledge of scrum to be successful: To have a successful planning session, the team must consist of members who are well aware of the agile scrum framework.