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Naveen is a professional agile coach and has been working independently for a long time in the Asia... Read more
Sprint planning is one of the most important Agile ceremonies, but it's often not done right or understood, especially in bigger teams with people of different skill levels.
At a recent meeting, we talked about the scrum sprint planning process, but the conversation got off track because there were so many people and different points of view.
To get everyone back on the same page and make sure everyone knows what to do going forward, I've put together this guide with five important do's and don'ts for Agile sprint planning.
These tips will help you make the most of your planning sessions and set your sprint up for success, whether you're a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or team member.
Sprint plans are events organized by the scrum team. In agile sprint planning, the entire scrum team decides to prioritize items or complete a product from the product backlog. This planning between the scrum team depends on the capacity, velocity, Definition of Done, and previous sprint results.
Usually, a sprint plan lasts approximately 2-4 hours for every one or two weeks of a sprint. Although, scrum sprint planning meetings can go longer for the longer Sprint. In any case, it should not be more than 8 hours.
A successful sprint planning meeting will discover two essential items:
The Sprint Goal: A written summary of things the scrum team plans to complete in the upcoming Sprint.
The Sprint Backlog: Sprint Back log is a list that includes stories and other product backlog items in which the team will work on the current Sprint.
Sprint planning happens between a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and a whole Agile team.
In Sprint Planning, the role of the product owner is to clarifies the product backlog items and their criteria, explains the sprint objective, and answers all the backlog questions. The scrum master coordinates and runs the meeting and makes it easy.
And the agile team works with efforts to meet the sprint commitment.
Here's a quick tip: If you want to get strategic input from your scrum team or development team, then bring the product roadmap along with the product backlog to the sprint meetings.
It will help your development team to get a bigger picture of the product's strategic vision. And they will be able to contribute more strategically to sprint planning.
Sprint Planning sets the foundation for a successful sprint. It’s more than just picking tasks—it's about aligning the team, clarifying priorities, and setting a realistic goal. Here are the top 5 things you should focus on to make your Sprint Planning effective and collaborative.
As per Scrum Guide - The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.
During the Sprint Planning, the product owner presents business objectives for the Sprint and an ordered Product Backlog.
The scrum team discusses what can be done based on the definition of done and crafts the Sprint Goal and forecast their work.
Scrum Teams ensure they have a meaningful sprint goal, not a generic goal. For example, "policy renewal for individual policyholders" for an insurance product rather than saying, the goal is "complete all product backlog items selected during the sprint." Challenges in crafting the sprint goal:-
The team has random product backlog items, so struggle to craft a sprint goal.
It can be avoided by having ordered product backlog, but if it is still needed, the team can ask the product owner about the most crucial product backlog item and set a goal around that.
The team picks up work for more than one product as they are supporting multiple products.
The team can avoid by widening the definition of a product or shortening sprint duration.
Team working on multiple components and Items are for components, not for a feature. Avoid such issues through having user-centric features as a backlog item.
Team working on support items like defects, incidents, and service requests. A meaningful sprint goal optimizes and improves product quality to reduce such defects and incidents.
The whole purpose of the retrospective is to improve the way of working either by adopting new processes, practices, and tools besides improving team collaboration and relationships among team members.
Since the team has come up with a few sprint retrospective commitments so the team must plan 1-2 items for the sprint else, it will never get adopted, and teams may struggle to understand the retrospective's usefulness.
For example, the team has agreed to develop mock-ups for backlog items to gain more clarity upfront to reduce ambiguity, so they must consider and plan the same in the sprint.
The definition of done is a common understanding within the Scrum Team on what DONE means, and it evolves as the team learns more about the product and technical skills.
It reflects the maturity of the team and improving the quality of a product. Referring definition of done helps the team to understand how much work they can plan for the Sprint.
An exhaustive list of items in the definition of done means fewer product backlog items as teams has to do a lot more to complete each backlog item.
For example, if the team has added automated regression testing to improve quality, it may need little more time to write an automated test script for backlog items.
The velocity is good to forecast, but only when the team remains the same working in the consistent sprint cycle. If any of these changes or a few holidays are coming up, it is better to check available team capacity during planning besides team velocity.
Since sprint planning is a timebox and the team must respect the timebox, sometimes teams struggle to formulate the sprint plan. For example, there is ambiguity in requirements or teams, not sure how to do it better instead of planning more. It may turn out to be counterproductive.
It doesn't mean teams should not prepare a plan but having a lightweight plan for the initial few days is good enough to start. Teams can meet again to plan during the development as they learn more about requirements and ways to accomplish work.
The development team pulls work from the product backlog to the sprint backlog, and I think everyone understands that. The Product Owner or the Scrum Master should not assign work to the Development Team. The development team members should also not just divide like your story vs. my story. The Development Team should look for the possibility to see how they can complete stories incrementally within the Sprint by working together. It is more like 2-3 team members pull one story to complete within 2-4 days collectively. This helps in minimizing spillover as they can get feedback early to adjust changes if needed. It also helps the team care about each other and learn each different skills to support when needed.
Having sub-tasks like design, coding, writing test cases, functional testing and code reviews, etc., promote a mini-waterfall kind of process during development. Not having sub-tasks may sound good, but it has to be done carefully to avoid transparency issues. Having component-based tasks like mobile interface, web interface, backend service, integration, etc. is better as it promotes collective ownership. Skill-based tasks may impact transparency and generate more technical debts too.
Velocity is not a reliable method for calculating productivity. See how to maximize work value by enabling teams to work on high valued product backlog items. Velocity is good for forecasting when there is no change in the sprint cycle and team composition. It is like based on speed on the highway cannot help measuring how much one can travel within an hour in city traffic. Similarly, changing drivers will impact speed, so not possible to forecast based on previous driver velocity if there is a new driver.
Focus on how to reduce defects by influencing factors that cause so many defects. Having a few stories helps in learning the expectations of the stakeholders. See how the team plans to reduce the technical debt because more technical debts mean higher total cost of ownership. Look for possibilities to adopt excellent technical practices such as Behavior-Driven Development, Agile Analysis, and other Extreme Programming practices.
A generic goal doesn't define a clear purpose of the sprint. Have a specific sprint goal and ordered product backlog items around that helps the team to stay focus throughout development. Goals like high-quality work, meet all acceptance criteria or deliver all the backlog items are not a good goal and these are part of the Definition of Done. Think about users and see how users can benefit from the outcome of the sprint.
Use this checklist to ensure a successful planning session:
The Sprint Goal is specific and focused on the user.
Backlog items are sorted and improved.
The team's capacity is checked and changed.
DoD is clear and agreed upon
There is at least one planned retrospective item.
There is a light plan for the first few days.
Sprint planning sets the tone for the whole sprint, and doing it right can make a big difference in how well the team works and how good the product is.
If you want to build a focused, high-functioning team, it's important to know what to do and what not to do during this event, whether you're a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or developer.
If you follow these five do's and don'ts and keep roles, goals, and capacity in mind, you can make your planning sessions more like meaningful conversations than messy checklists.
The scrum sprint planning process is more than just filling up the sprint backlog. It's also about getting the team on the same page about a shared vision and promising to deliver results that matter. If done right, sprint planning in Agile can lead to value, learning, and constant improvement.
Use this guide to change how you do things and make sure that every sprint is useful.
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Naveen is a professional agile coach and has been working independently for a long time in the Asia Pacific. He works with the software development team and product team to develop awesome products based on empirical processes.
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