SolutionsMeeting agenda softwareCollaborate on meeting agendas, assign action items, and ask for meeting feedback. We’re already at step 4 and we haven’t even had the sprint planning meeting yet! The thing is, your sprint planning meeting sets the stage for the next few weeks or month of work.
Knowing your team’s capacity for the work they can commit to is critical for successful planning. This should not be based solely on past sprint velocity because each sprint is different. The backlog grooming ceremony is a much better time to scope and estimate stories before they’re pulled into a sprint.
Together Platform’s 1-on-1 Engineering Mentoring Session Meeting Agenda Template
The product backlog can address just about anything, to include new functionality, bugs, and risks. Product backlog items (PBI’s) must be small enough to complete during a sprint and should be small enough sprint planning agenda to complete within a few days. All stories must be verified that they are implemented to the satisfaction of the Product Owner. Ensure all sprint candidates meet the team’s definition of ready.
Once your developers have shared their calendars, it’s easy to see how much time they can devoteto the sprint in the upcoming period. After going over the latest developments, it’s time to take stock of your developers’ availability. With so much material to cover, you’d do well to create an agenda to keep you on track during the meeting—that way, you won’t forget anything.
What is Sprint Planning?
In the end, assuming the team is 80% productive, we’re left with a capacity of 51.2 points. Use this Sprint Planning Meeting and Agenda Template to host a collaborative discussion that allows the Scrum team to choose the direction for the next sprint. Cross-Functional MeetingsStay aligned on projects, drive progress and accountability, and improve collaboration. AnalyticsGain insight about your company’s meeting frequency, productivity, and feedback culture. Guest UsersKeep meeting notes in one place by bringing everyone you work with – vendors, clients, agencies – into Fellow.
Prior to every sprint , make sure you have established a specific product vision and prioritization on what needs to be done. In addition, choose goals and objectives for the upcoming sprint. With this visualization, you can gauge how much velocity will realistically fit into the upcoming sprint and, consequently, how many story points you’ll be able to include. This sprint goal defines what your team is trying to accomplish during the sprint and will give your developers direction. Before planning your next sprint, you’d do well to begin the meeting with a review of the previous one. Sprints are part of the popular scrum framework used for project management in agile organizations.
Best practices for sprint planning
Ultimately, the resulting sprint plan is a negotiation between the development team and product owner based on value and effort. If you’re building a new product that may take several sprints to be MVP-ready, it’s tough to define useful sprint goals. It can be tempting to set a goal to deliver all committed stories in the sprint, but this puts your focus on output rather than outcomes. Gather any notes and action items from the sprint planning session.
- This can result in your team performing a sprints worth of work but not feeling as though they’ve made a lot of progress.
- As a product owner or scrum master, the better you prepare for your sprints, the more likely you are to accomplish your objectives.
- This is called “timeboxing”, which simply means setting a maximum amount of time for the team to accomplish a task.
- In these cases, do not consider these stories as valid sprint backlog candidates.
- At the sprint planning meeting, the product owner decides what the team should work on and the team decides how to complete the work.
That plan shouldn’t become a monkey for the team’s back, instead, it should focus the team on valuable outcomes, and allow guardrails for self-organization. A good sprint plan motivates everyone by defining an outcome and a clear plan for success. Instead of building the most complete, “every minute of the sprint is accounted for” sprint plan, focus on the goal and build enough of a sprint backlog to get started. Next, ensure that the product backlog is ordered to allow the team to pick up work if they delivered on the sprint goal early. Part of every great sprint planning session is defining what “done” is for the project.
The Sprint Planning Checklist
Once the product owner presents their ideas for the sprint forecast, the team can validate (and/or adjust) it and agree to a plan of action for the sprint. It’s also important to make a distinction between the sprint goal and the sprint backlog. The sprint goal is the objective of the sprint such as a hypothesis to test, an experiment to implement, or a general goal to achieve. The sprint backlog is the work that needs to be done for the team to achieve the goal. Avoid changing the sprint goal midway through the meeting — it’ll take away from the focus the team needs to achieve its commitments.
For more tips on how to best plan for a sprint, check out this post. Product owners can use the sprint marker to calculate velocity. The Product Owner proposes how the product could increase its value and utility in the current Sprint. The whole Scrum Team then collaborates to define https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ a Sprint Goal that communicates why the Sprint is valuable to stakeholders. The Sprint Goal must be finalized prior to the end of Sprint Planning. As described in the Scrum Guide, Sprint Planning initiates the Sprint by laying out the work to be performed for the Sprint.
Take Action
First of all, curate a list of user stories that will be completed in this sprint by the scrum team. This may include product backlog items and stories that carry over from the last sprint. A sprint planning meeting is a timed working session where an entire team comes together to work through a set of product backlog tasks. A product lead usually chooses the tasks, and the number of tasks chosen depends on the team’s capacity and the determined sprint length. Team capacity is the measure of how many story points or product backlog items (scrum parlance for “tasks”) your team can complete during a sprint under normal circumstances.
Having an efficient sprint planning meeting agenda goes a long way in advancing a software product. Agile software development aims to add more value to a software product through incremental development. Now that your team understands their velocity, you’re ready to plan your team’s capacity.
What happens during the sprint planning meeting?
Sales LeadersFellow helps Sales leaders run productive 1-on-1s, team meetings, forecasting calls, and coaching sessions. This decision is based on how much you already pulled in the sprint, the team’s availability in the upcoming sprint, and how much you got done in previous sprints. But just because it’s an important meeting doesn’t mean you should let it go on and on and on. There’s nothing worse than long, ineffective meetings (I’m talking about you, “weekly-status-update-to-satisfy-the-micromanaging-CEO”). And when you’re talking about the future of your product, it’s easy for those meetings to go off the rails.
