To make that meeting productive and to reach the end of the sprint effectively, here are some best practices to follow. 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. Team velocity refers to how fast your team can complete the amount of work assigned to it. To determine velocity, product owners and scrum masters look at previous sprints for examples of how fast the team finishes similar work. Part of sprint planning is giving the development team a chance to set expectations for the product owner.

The scrum master is responsible for making sure the meeting happens the timebox is understood. If the team is happy before the timebox is finished, then the event is over. A timebox is a maximum time allowed; there is no minimum time allowed. The best sprint planning meetings blend strategic alignment with tactical planning. When sprint planning is done well, team members leave the meeting feeling motivated and excited about the work ahead.

Agile Priorities

Topics like team capacity, prioritization of tasks, and the goal of the sprint are also addressed. A sprint planning meeting is a working session for scrum teams to align on what will be accomplished during the next sprint and how the work will be completed. The development team and product owner collaborate to prioritize work and regroup around sprint goals. A sprint plan is a part of the Scrum framework where the entire team gets together to discuss what product backlog items they will be working on in that sprint or iteration. It also has the initial plan on how they will go about completing the selected product backlog items for the sprint. A sprint goal that needs to be achieved by the end of the iteration is also established during the sprint planning process.

It’s also important to make a distinction between the sprint goal and the sprint backlog. The sprint goal is the objective of the sprint such as a hypothesis sprint planning meeting agenda to test, an experiment to implement, or a general goal to achieve. The sprint backlog is the work that needs to be done for the team to achieve the goal.

What’s a Sprint Planning meeting?

There are three main things you should think about when you and your team members are choosing the next sprint backlog items to complete. Use agile estimation techniques and story points to better understand workload and capacity. Ensure you set realistic and reasonable goals based on your best estimations. Better sprint planning and retrospectives with user story maps in Jira.

The 2017 update included the language “enough for next 2-3 days of work”, which was a clear hint of the waste you likely get, as you try to plan complex work in great detail. When there’s lots of unknowns, planning to a high level of detail usually means we have a high amount of waste. Product owners can use the sprint marker to calculate velocity. https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ Your Scrum certification examination comprises multiple-choice test questions. Reading The Scrum Framework will help Scrum professionals like you to acquire the know-how to pass your Scrum certification examination and get your Scrum certification. However, thanks to The Scrum Framework, you will become a lot more successful in your job interviews.

Improved morale

This is when the team collectively commits to the batch of work for each sprint, which is typically two to four weeks long. You will determine what you will build, test, and release to customers. Avoid changing the sprint goal midway through the meeting — it’ll take away from the focus the team needs to achieve its commitments. The first planning meeting with the new team slightly differs from the stable ones.

This can help a sprint retrospective and sprint planning session go more smoothly. If the product backlog is regularly maintained, the team leader will already know which tasks need to be completed. Agile leaders manage sprint planning, organizing product backlog items, and ensuring that the entire Scrum team stays on track against the sprint timeline. If they notice a team member with a heavy load of work, it’s up to them to figure out a solution for how to help the team member progress without being overburdened. In general, product owners and scrum masters need to do everything they can to prepare ahead of the sprint planning meeting.

More in Agile

Pick a time that works for everyone involved, asking for feedback from your team about when is best. Schedule the meetings well in advance in everyone’s calendar so that no one forgets about it or books other engagements. They help you for preparation and should be prepared before the start of the meeting.

• If not, make sure the whole team understands and agrees on an ending point for the current sprint.
• In a Scrum project, every sprint begins with Sprint Planning Meeting.
• This means that all of these items are properly identified, test cases have been written and all the descriptions have been set.
• The sprint planning meeting should be reserved for planning and goal setting.
• By listening to customer input and involving them early on, the team can make course corrections and keep customers engaged in the development process.
• So, for example, the sprint planning meeting for a two-week sprint would be no longer than four hours.

Explore using different estimation techniques such as t-shirt sizing or story points. Different techniques might provide different views of the problem. With end of support for our Server products fast approaching, create a winning plan for your Cloud migration with the Atlassian Migration Program. Any notes you and your team make during the meeting are time-stamped too, so you’ll always be able to go back and get the full context from the recording.

Vowel AI: Let AI do the Meeting Grunt Work

It also contains the estimation of each task and also the information about all of the necessary tasks that are needed to deliver the work. Well, a sprint planning meeting is a ceremonial event in the Scrum paradigm that has been adopted by many teams in the organizational culture nowadays. These teams utilize these gatherings to mark the beginning and ending milestones of the sprint. This article is all about teaching you how to conduct a sprint planning meeting that will make your upcoming sprints more effective, efficient and hopefully less miserable. Let us discuss some of the major benefits of sprint planning meetings. The Product Owner refines Product backlogs and makes necessary adjustments before the meeting.

Coming to the planning session with a draft set of features to propose in the meeting will help you use your actual meeting time much more effectively. You can also prepare by creating a collaborative meeting agenda and sharing it with your attendees at least one business day ahead of the call. This will help them to prepare and add any talking points of their own.

Project Management

Backlog refinement is an optional event in scrum, because some backlogs don’t need it. However, for most teams, it’s better to get the team together to review and refine the backlog prior to sprint planning. Even in Agile project management, it’s possible to have task dependencies — product backlog items that can’t be finished until something else is done.