The scrum manager needs to measure the velocity of the team and inform them of their progress. That acts as a motivating factor and encourages the team to act faster on their work. Velocity refers to the amount of work that a team completes and can be measured in hours, number of tasks, or story points. Measuring velocity encourages constant improvement, thus better performance of the items in the product backlog. Sprint planning allows the team members to identify their dependencies, capacity and to set attainable goals.
The best sprint planning meetings blend strategic alignment with tactical planning. They are times for development teams to not only assign work, but also come together around a shared vision for what the work means and how it will impact the business and your customers. When sprint planning is done well, team members leave the meeting feeling motivated and excited about the work ahead. In scrum, the sprint is a set period of time where all the work is done.
Set Dependencies
The length gives the members a rough picture of the work they need to do to complete their tasks. A sprint planning meeting is typically attended by the entire Scrum team, including the Product Owner, Developers, and the Scrum Master. For sprint planning, the Scrum team comes together and plans out the work that will be completed during the upcoming sprint through collaboration. Next, we take the 400 hours (for a two-week sprint) and deduct all the hours spent on meetings and calls.
The team decides what stories they’ll tackle and discuss the requirements and functionality that each user story needs. Comprehensive task lists and precise estimates are not the goal of sprint planning meetings. The purpose of sprint planning is to select the right natural language processing set of product backlog items and have a rough idea of how to work on them. The team does not need to know every task they’ll perform to accomplish this goal. And the team certainly does not need to know if one of those tasks will take 5 hours instead of 4.
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So, if the team finishes all the required agenda items during the designated time, then the meeting concludes. According to the scrum guide, sprints are the heartbeat of scrum, where ideas are turned into values. They are fixed-length events of one month or less to create consistency. A new sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous sprint. Having done the heavy lifting, we’re now in the process of developing and rolling out a range of new Moments.
The team decides on user stories according to priority and their capacity and velocity. A sprint planning meeting is a meeting where a scrum team meets to plan the next sprint. Rather than simple transcripts, end users and businesses can now enjoy actionable intelligence from every conversation. This has implications for any service provider or business seeking to unlock added insight from their conversations, without the need for large in-house AI budgets and teams.
Set a timer
Empirical processes are very hard to plan, so don’t kid yourself—you can’t build the perfect plan. Unlike in sport, scrum encourages you to be always sprinting so you can deliver working software, while continuously learning and improving. For example, if a story feels like it’s probably three points, it’s a good idea to overestimate the time it will take to account for unforeseen issues. For example, let’s say you’re hoping to fit in a three-point and five-point story, but there’s only capacity left for five points. You can decide to pull in the five-pointer or opt for the three-pointer with another small story. The members share information on what they are doing, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Starting a sprint without names on any tasks can be unsettling to teams and ScrumMasters who are new to Scrum. Start scaling back by asking people to sign up for only about half of the tasks in the sprint. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to discover all you can do with this fully extendable agile development tool. Every new year brings a renewed sense of purpose and in the software world, promises to ship better software. At Atlassian, we rely heavily on the agile ceremony of sprint planning to refocus execution, minimize surprises, and guarantee overall higher quality code during the new year.
Estimating team capacity in hours
Instead, target about 45 minutes of meeting time multiplied by the number of weeks in the sprint. So a two-week sprint should have a 90-minute sprint planning meeting. And a full four-week sprint (or one month sprint) should target a 3-hour sprint planning timebox. Generally, sprint meetings last one to two hours for every week of a sprint. For instance, if your sprint is two weeks long, the sprint planning meeting should take no more than four hours.
The scrum master will be successful when the development team has understood the limitations for the coming sprint. At the beginning of the sprint planning meeting, the product owner reiterates the product vision and how this coming sprint aligns with the product vision. Firstly, the product owner gives a vision or justification for the work considered for the next sprint.
What is Sprint Planning?
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). The team should come up with a strategy for support and how to fix bugs if any arise. It helps the team to deliver a better-quality product at the end of every sprint. Meet with the team members before the actual sprint planning meeting and set the expectations for the sprint. Use the opportunity to evaluate how relevant the stories are and the members’ ability and check for any barrier towards achieving your goal.
- After you’ve assessed the work and effort rolling over, the team can discuss new stories to pull in.
- Agile systems rely on work cycles known as iterations or sprints that break projects down into smaller, more manageable chunks.
- During the planning meeting, the team reviews the product backlog for tasks that still need to be completed, which gives them a better idea of where they stand with project completion.
- The sprint planning process is a collaborative effort and it needs to be attended by the product owner, the development team, and the Scrum Master.
Include links to velocity reports and other relevant documents to the template. This helps your team understand each member’s contributions and how much work they can complete during the sprint. As a team, decide what you’re going to accomplish over the course of the sprint. Make sure to include definitions, guidelines, and any other resource your team needs to work efficiently during the sprint. By adding clear, measurable results to the user story, the outcomes can be clearly measured, and you know when you are done.
Sprint Planning Meeting Guide [+ Free Template]
But no matter what, don’t continue your meeting without your goal figured out first. Since sprint planning meetings tend to be longer than most other meeting types, consider also scheduling a 5- or 10-minute break in the middle for participants. Sprints aren’t just about running on a track—though they do take a lot of inspiration from the sport. They’re short and move super fast so teams can get a lot done in less time. Practicing in sprints is a popular agile project management methodology, and it’s used quite often by software engineering teams.
At first, the team will use its best judgment with regard to the forecast, and work through a few sprints of trial and error. Once the team’s velocity–nicely visualized by the velocity chart in Jira– is established numerically, use that metric to guide the sprint forecast. During sprint planning it is easy to get ‘bogged down’ in the work focusing on which task should come first, who should do it, and how long will it take. For complex work, the level of information you know at the start can be low, and much of it is based on assumptions. Scrum is an empirical process, meaning that you can’t plan upfront, but rather learn by doing, and then feed that information back into the process.
During the planning meeting, the team reviews the product backlog for tasks that still need to be completed, which gives them a better idea of where they stand with project completion. This can be done in a task management system like JIRA, Notion, or Linear. A sprint planning agenda keeps team members organized and focused on key elements of an upcoming sprint. This agenda strengthens your sprint planning processes by ensuring all expectations, goals, and other important criteria are defined and agreed upon among the project team members. In this article, we will discuss how to achieve the greatest results from a sprint planning agenda, as well as the steps necessary for holding effective sprint planning meetings.