Sprint planning: there's no point in your team running, it has to start on time

The sprint planningmeeting is one of the scrum ceremonies that set the pace for agile project management .

What is the current status of the project? What are the next priorities?

This is exactly what the members of a project team inevitably ask themselves as the project progresses, sprint after sprint.

But what exactly does it consist of? What is its objective and how does it work?

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Sprint planning: definition

The sprint planning meeting is the first meeting of each sprint, or development cycle, which generally lasts from two weeks to a month and during which the developers design and test new features.

The following meetings are :

1. the daily scrum, each day, to review progress and any sticking points ;
2. the sprint review, to present deliverables to the customer and gather feedback;
3. the sprint retrospective, to take stock of the past sprint and identify areas for improvement in the organisation of the next sprint.

The objective of sprint planning

Sprint planning consists of determining a sprint goal and then planning the functionalities and user stories deemed to have priority from all those listed in the product backlog.

Those selected for the forthcoming sprint are then moved into the sprint backlog, the set of US that the team is committed to delivering by the end of the sprint.

🎯 The sprint goal and the sprint backlog are the two results, called outputs, of sprint planning.

Stakeholders and their role

In scrum, there are always 3 major roles:

• the Product Owner prepares the sprint planning and the key elements of the Product Backlog to be addressed, together with the Scrum Master ;
• The Scrum Master leads the meeting;
• The Scrum team takes part in defining the sprint objective and estimating and prioritising tasks.

The duration of a sprint plan

Sprint planning should not exceed 2 hours per week. To respect this timing, you can prepare the ground by holding a backlog refinement, an intermediate meeting during which an estimate of the user stories and their workload can be made.

☝️ With the Scrummethod , all activities are divided into what are known as timeboxes, to give events a fixed or maximum duration. The aim of timeboxing is to limit the time spent on an activity. The shorter the duration of a task, the less important it is for the final result.

For example, sprint planning is limited to a maximum of 8 hours for a one-month sprint.

How do you draw up a sprint plan?

A 4-stage process

1. All the stakeholders take stock of the product's progress, which is essential for defining the sprint objective.
   This generally corresponds to the completion of a user story.
   
   
2. If this has not already been done during Refinement (or Grooming), the Product Owner and Scrum Master go back over the planned user stories (functional subjects) and break them down into technical subjects.
   
   
3. They also check that the sum of the complexity points (story points) allocated to the user stories is consistent with the sprint capacity.
   
   🔎 To determine these story points, there's the planning pokermethod . Some do this during sprint planning, others upstream, in Refinement meetings.
   
   🚀 Velocity represents all the points completed by the team over the last few sprints. This KPI is used to calculate capacity = team performance x team availability.
   
   
4. The sprint backlog is updated. For each product backlog item selected, the scrum team plans the work required and recalls the DoD, Definition of Done.
   For a better overview, the tasks are written in the "To-Do" column on the Scrum Board.

☝️ The increment is the set of "done" elements finalised in the previous sprint, updated before each sprint planning.

How do you do an online sprint planning?

With telecommuting and remote Scrum teams, how can you create an online sprint plan?

Software in SaaS mode, in the cloud, can overcome this constraint, to prepare the planning and keep a close-knit team, aware of the different tasks to be carried out.

Take a look at our directory to discover collaborative tools, such as online project management software, tailored to your needs.

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On your marks, get set, sprint!

Choosing what can be achieved in a sprint can be a challenge. However, the further the Scrum team progresses with the project, the more precise its sprint forecastsbecome.

By defining a clear objective and a shared vision, it is also more likely to move towards the success of the project and meet the deadlines.

That's what sprint planning is all about: steering the team in the right direction and ensuring that the final product meets all the requirements.

How do you go about planning? Share your best tips in the comments!