What is sprint planning, and how do you facilitate it like a pro?
The scrum team will come together to decide the #sprintgoal and which items from the backlog will be included in the sprint backlog.
It’s an event that helps the team determine what needs doing, why it needs doing, and how specifically they will complete the work.
While the backlog items are essential, the team is focused on the sprint goal for the sprint rather than specific items on the backlog.
While those items are essential, and a great deal of time and effort is dedicated to identifying the proper work to include in the sprint backlog, the team is more focused on the goal that must be accomplished for the sprint to be considered a success.
The development team will be conversing with the product owner to understand which work is the most valuable in the context of the backlog and in which order the priority lies. Still, they will not get fixated on the items themselves.
This is because not every item can be completed in a specific sprint. Sometimes, some permissions are required, and at other times, there may be dependencies which means that the development team will need to discard one or more items on the backlog and focus instead on achieving the sprint goal.
In the sprint review, the team will evaluate how the sprint went and which items proved to be a problem. They will also identify what needs to change for some discarded items to be reincluded in a future sprint so they are all dealt with within the sprint period.
John McFadyen
John McFadyen has worked on some of the most enormous, most complex agile transformations in Europe and the UK. He has also worked as a scrum master and agile coach for some of the highest-performing scrum teams in the world.
In this short video, John walks us through sprint planning and how you can facilitate this event like a professional.