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Sprint Planning

Sprint Planning

GOAL: Finalize the sprint goal and what will be done in the sprint.

Audience: The whole product team.*

Meeting Agenda Summary

  1. Review the proposed sprint goal.

  2. Review capacity

  3. For each proposed story, starting with the highest priority

    1. Summarize the story

    2. Make sure the team feels comfortable adding it to the sprint

  4. Finalize the sprint goal

 

Overview

In traditional Scrum Sprint Planning, there is a single meeting to determine what can be done in the sprint and how it will be done. Bitovi breaks Sprint Planning meeting up into three parts:

  • Sprint Prototype - Identifies the most valuable items that can be done. This is represented by the Sprint Goal and the shell stories in the sprint.

  • Refinement - Meetings to determine how the work will be done.

  • Sprint Planning - Finalizes the sprint goal and what will be done in the coming sprint.

Ideally, sprint planning should be a short (30 min) meeting to finalize the sprint goals. Each story should already be ready and pointed.

Preparation

Before sprint planning, the PO should check and make sure everything is ready to perform a sprint planning meeting:

  • The team has provided its availability for the next sprint. This can be used to calculate the expected number of story points that will be completed.

    EXPECTED_STORY_POINTS = AVERAGE_VELOCITY * (TEAM_DAYS_AVAILABLE / AVERAGE_TEAM_DAYS_AVAILABLE) // Example EXPECTED_STORY_POINTS = 20 pts * (5 people * 10 days) / 60 days EXPECTED_STORY_POINTS ~= 17 pts

     

  • Stories are ready.

  • The proposed sprint goal is updated.

Finally, the PO might do a capacity best fit and put the stories they think will fit into the sprint. (The team will be the ultimate arbiter of what can fit into the sprint).

Conducting Sprint Planning

 

  1. Review the proposed sprint goal in the Sprint Prototyping document (0000-00-00 Sprint Prototyping ). Make updates as necessary.

  2. Review capacity. See the equation above.

  3. For each proposed story, starting with the highest priority

    1. Summarize the story

    2. Make sure the team feels comfortable adding it to the sprint. The number of total points added to the sprint is visible at the top of the sprint.

    3. Optionally assign stories to people. You can see who assigned stories within a sprint. Clicking the ... button shows how many issues and stories are assigned to each person.

  4. Once you’ve reached the limit of what the team can commit to, finalize the sprint goal.

 

PRO TIP: It’s often motivating to explain why the sprint goal matters to the team.