All You Need to Know About Sprint Planning Meetings

Make responding mandatory to ensure complete involvement from the team. The team should examine the previous Sprints and the progress made. This includes reviewing the burndown chart, discussing what went well and what didn’t, and using these insights to plan for the upcoming Sprint. The team should also consider their normal team velocity and how it may impact the upcoming Sprint.A tool that can help you with this is Dive. It is an AI-powered meeting tool designed to elevate your productivity and efficiency. Dive streamlines your meeting processes, automates task allocation, and ensures every meeting is value-driven.

Insights from the Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Review are used to inform planning for the current Sprint. This empirical process helps the team learn from past experiences and improve their Agile Sprint Planning practices. Teams will learn by doing and improve upon their process as they learn from past mistakes, so don’t aim to plan every minute of your sprint.

Handling the stumbling block of ad hoc tasks or unplanned work

The total number of story points per sprint equals team velocity. Capacity is an estimate of the future based on what time is expected to be available. Don’t forget to subtract the time the employee works or does not work outside of the sprint.

Clarify who on the team is completing them and when they should be done by. Using templates in Fellow.app enables you to collaboratively prepare and edit notes, create tasks and integrate with 20+ apps. Decide what to do next
After seeing the big picture, let the team group the post-its per topic and vote on the most important ones. Remember that it is key to keep an open and collaborative environment https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ during the strategy session to facilitate idea generation and ensure the smooth progression of the sprint. Welcome and introductions (5 minutes)
– Scrum Master to briefly welcome team members and set expectations for the session. Open Discussion and Clarification
– Reserve time for team members to voice concerns, ask questions, or offer suggestions related to the upcoming sprint.

Identifying Potential Challenges

The frequency of sprint planning meetings depends entirely on the organization but typically they happen every few weeks, or at least ahead of the start of each sprint. The ideas and plans then go into a storyboard, which typically includes about 5 to 15 user stories per sprint. User stories describe the way that a specific type of user will interact with the product and any problems they’re currently facing, to help guide how the new feature will be built.

• Develop and document contingency plans to address potential roadblocks or complications.
• It also compels attendees to review leftover tasks from the last sprint and create an appropriate action plan to bring them into the fold.
• This also gives the team a continuous sense of progress, which helps keep motivations level up.
• The team’s capacity is evaluated based on their average velocity, team availability, and the time limit set for the Sprint.
• Once you review what you achieved, you’ll be ready to present the current sprint’s goals.

Attach your meeting agenda and any meeting notes so they can be easily accessed in your Scrum ceremonies. Think of an ideal product as a machine, and the product backlog items as bolts and gears. To create a desired machine, we must 1) make sure the bolts and gears are in place, 2) they are properly lubricated.

The seven benefits of the five Scrum ceremonies

A sprint represents a specific amount of work that can be completed in a given amount of time. The sprint planning meeting aims to allow the development team to identify, estimate, and include meaningful work in an upcoming sprint. In this post, we’ll be exploring the basic building blocks of a sprint planning meeting agenda.

While it might feel repetitive to you, the repetition increases awareness and learning for everyone involved — people forget 60% of information in meetings after only 48 hours. Alexandria Hewko shares her insights from a background in international marketing, business management, and information technology. 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.

Ready to skill upyour entire team?

In addition to defining what’ll be delivered, the meeting also covers how the work will be done. The development team works together to break down the chosen user stories into smaller, more manageable tasks. They estimate how much effort each task will require and create a sprint backlog – a list of tasks that’ll be completed within the sprint’s timeframe. In addition, choose goals and objectives for the upcoming sprint.

Product backlog items (PBI’s) must be small enough to complete during a sprint and should be small enough to complete within a few days. All stories must be verified that they are implemented to the satisfaction of the Product Owner. Share this with your team prior to the meeting so they can contribute. During sprint planning, the team works together to determine a goal for the sprint and then individuals commit to work they plan to accomplish towards it. A good sprint planning meeting provides structure, sets expectations, and defines clear outcomes that help everyone on the team feel motivated and successful. As the discussion between the product owner and the development team progresses, you’ll decide what the sprint goal is.

What Is the Sprint Planning Meeting?

Other key stakeholders, such as Project Managers or the executive team, may also be invited depending on the nature of the Sprint Goals. To find out more about how Flow can help you track and improve your sprints, contact our team sprint planning meeting agenda for a demo today. This metric is calculated by multiplying the total number of Scrum team members by the total number of working days. Roadblocks such as a lack of resources, poor communication, and others should be highlighted.

This is the bulk of the meeting where the team members collaborate to come up with a sprint backlog, break down user stories into tasks, and confirm who owns certain tasks. A sprint planning meeting is a meeting where a scrum team meets to plan the next sprint. ‎The sprint planning meeting is the first of these five ceremonies. When used together as an iterative process, the scrum ceremonies can revolutionize the way your team works together. The main purpose of a sprint planning meeting is to decide as a team what you’ll deliver during the upcoming sprint.

Template 14

In addition, an agile sprint planning meeting agenda must discuss acceptance criteria where it should highlight the success factors for a backlog item from a business perspective. The product owner highlights what is in the product backlog – the complete list of tasks for the project. Then the team decides on a sprint goal and chooses which of the specific user stories or features they’ll work on in the upcoming sprint. Based on historical data of the team, first determine if product backlog items are too large to complete in a sprint. In these cases, do not consider these stories as valid sprint backlog candidates.