What is Sprint Planning

What is Sprint Planning?

7-9 minutes

A sprint planning meeting is conducted before the start of a sprint . The purpose of this meeting is to determine the sprint plan and set a sprint goal .

Sprint planning includes agreeing on the number of backlog items in the sprint that is the responsibility of the development team and as well as to define the goal for the current sprint and sprint backlog .

During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner describes the highest priority features to the entire team. They will then discuss which stories the team will do in that sprint. The meeting should be attended by the whole team. If additional expertise on specific backlog items are required, then stakeholders can be also invited. The team may include the refinement sessions as well.

Sprint planning

Benefits of Sprint Planning Meeting

Below are some of the benefits of running a successful Sprint Planning meeting:

Enables the Team to agree on the sprint goal and commitment.

Enables task discovery, sign up, prioritization and estimation

Creates the platform to communicate dependencies and identify team capacity to set and commit to an achievable sprint goal.

Length of Sprint Planning Meeting

Each sprint begins with a sprint planning meeting. Typically, for a four-week sprint this meeting should last eight hours. For a two-week sprint, plan for about four hours. As a general rule of thumb, multiply the number of weeks in your sprint by two hours to gety our total sprint planning meeting length. The following table illustrates the rule.

Total Sprint Duration Sprint Planning Duration

1 week 2 hours

2 week 4 hours

3 week 6 hours

4 week 8 hours

Preparation Work before Meeting

Now, let’s review what we need to prepare for each of the scrum roles before we attend the Sprint Planning Meeting:

For Scrum Master

Identify the right people & schedule meeting with all logistics e.g. WebEX, Videoconference etc.
Prepares and publishes agenda
Make sure the skills and capabilities of team members are known and are generally aligned with the needs of the backlog item candidates for the sprint

For Product Owner

Each feature or user story is small enough to be completed within a sprint and includes detailed requirements and acceptance criteria
Ensure backlog items are prioritized with the most important work items at the top and ready as per team’s definition of ready