How Should The Sprint Planning Meeting Go?
Sprint Planning is a collaborative process that involves the entire Scrum team. The team can increase their chances of delivering high-quality, valuable software by focusing on the upcoming sprint and ensuring everyone is aligned.
- The Product Owner indicates the Product Backlog items — and corresponding priorities — that they consider the next sprint’s best candidates. Items can be user stories, tasks, or bugs. The Product Owner proposes those items according to customer value and product vision.
- Based on effort estimates and the Product Owner’s proposal, the development team selects the product backlog items to work on during the current sprint. Developers agree on the sprint goal with the Product Owner by promoting those items to sprint backlog items.
- Although optional, the team might discuss dependencies between items and who should work on each.
Very few steps, right? However, some practical actions should add on to these steps. Discover what those actions are below. - The development team provides effort estimates for the selected product backlog items. This can be done through techniques like Planning Poker, where each team member gives an estimate for each item, and then the team discusses and reaches a consensus.
- The development team breaks down each selected item into smaller, more manageable tasks and adds them to the Sprint Backlog.
- The team defines the Sprint Goal, a brief and concise statement of what they want to achieve during the sprint.
- The team reviews the Sprint Backlog and ensures that it’s feasible. If there are any concerns, they discuss them and adjust the Sprint Backlog accordingly.
- The team assigns tasks to individual team members, considering each person’s skills, strengths, and preferences.
- Finally, the team sets a plan for delivering the selected items by the end of the sprint, including what they’ll do each day and how they’ll keep track of their progress.