Running a successful Sprint Planning Meeting
Have you ever participated in a sprint planning meeting that seemed to drag on for hours without accomplishing much other than making you dread the next one?
The sprint planning meeting is a crucial ritual that teams must hold to produce high-quality work.
I’m going to break down this particular meeting in this article and provide some useful advice to help you have a more effective, efficient, and bearable agile sprint planning meeting in the future. For more information on relevant topics you can explore Universal Agile.
How Do Sprint Planning Meetings Work?
A sprint planning meeting is one of the Scrum ceremonies that teams who use sprints to mark when work “begins” and “ends” have adopted most frequently. What can be delivered during the upcoming sprint? is one of the questions it is intended to address. And how are we going to carry out that task?
Simply put, the sprint planning agenda should establish expectations, provide structure, and define the backlog for the upcoming sprint.
These meetings involve many people, and they involve a lot of cooperation. Let’s analyze what each role does in detail.
Scrum Master
The ScrumMaster leads the sprint planning meeting and makes sure that meeting spaces are reserved, materials are on hand, participants are ready, and all video conferencing and other connectivity requirements are met. The ScrumMaster should timebox this meeting according to how long the sprint is in terms of scheduling.
Product Owner
The Product Owner is in charge of making sure that every item on the backlog is ready before the meeting. They must provide clarification on each product backlog item’s specifics and serve as a team resource for inquiries regarding use cases or acceptance criteria. A Product Owner should allocate plenty of time to prepare for this meeting because it is arguably the most crucial.
The Development Team
Those doing the work must be present at the sprint planning meeting. Anyone who will contribute to the work product, including designers, developers, test engineers, and others, needs to be present and actively participate in this meeting so they can leave with a clear understanding of what is expected of them and what is the top priority to work on during the upcoming sprint.
Remember that teams improve their sprint planning over time. A team may not have a common understanding of how much can be accomplished in each sprint if it is young (or new to the agile methodology). We’ll discuss calculating velocity later. Just remember that more experienced teams typically perform better in this. Give yourself some grace if your first sprint planning meeting did not go as well as you had hoped because agile involves a constant improvement component.
Why Should A Sprint Planning Meeting Be Conducted?
How come a sprint planning meeting is held? Because it’s a fantastic chance to gather the entire team and work together to decide what each person is in charge of during the upcoming sprint! Before implementing this agile practice, it was challenging for our team to pinpoint exactly what they were working on during each sprint and, more importantly, why. Since that time, our team has had a lot more success working together and feels more assured about the results we should be able to produce by selecting the valid inputs for sprint planning meeting.
Two key concepts will be defined during sprint planning:
A sprint goal
This is a succinct (1-2 sentence) summary of what the team will accomplish during the sprint. So that people can refer to it at any time, the team co-writes and publishes it. The sprint goal also provides stakeholders with a concise and clear statement of what the team is working on without requiring them to wade through the minutiae of the backlog.
A backlog for sprints
The team chooses and agrees to work on the following items from the product backlog during the sprint, which is listed here. It also includes every job required to complete the assignment. It is also necessary to estimate each task.
Meeting preparation for the sprint
Preparation for the backlog
The Product Owner must make sure that every item in the backlog that might be used for the sprint (features, bugs, optimizations, stakeholder feedback, etc.) meets the team’s definition of ready in the days or weeks before sprint planning. This entails the organization of the items, the identification or removal of dependencies, the writing of test cases, the listing of acceptance criteria, and the setting of all descriptions. The sprint planning meeting would be less effective and more time-consuming without this preparation.
Measure user stories
The Product Owner and the team must also make sure that each user story is the proper size—not too big or too small—so that it can be carefully taken into account during sprint planning. With more time spent working together, the team will understand this better.
Check the group’s dedication
Check the calendar to see who is available and when. Are there any upcoming holidays? Will your lead developer be taking a trip? Know how much time each person will have available during the upcoming sprint.
Establish your velocity, or how you’ll measure it
Each team is different in this way. Use that as your benchmark for how much can be accomplished while planning the sprint if you have an average amount of work that is typically completed in each sprint. Track the number of completed and accepted story points from sprint to sprint if you’re trying to establish this for a newly formed team.
Determine your capacity
Another measurement connected to the pieces above is this one. Be sure to account for the fact that your team may not be entirely focused on one product or may be tempted to work on other projects when organizing the sprint.
Conclusion
The sprint planning meeting can be very intimidating, but it is the most powerful tool in the scrum ceremony toolbox if enough preparation has been done and the team is prepared to take on a sprint together. If you’re still unsure whether your team is prepared for one of these, keep in mind that if you have a backlog of work, are a member of an agile team that is focused on creating a product, and are already using some agile processes to complete the work, you should conduct a sprint planning meeting and take certified scrum training from universal agile.
