How To Run An Effective Sprint Planning Meeting + Tips To Plan Technical Debt Work

As a product owner or scrum master, the better you prepare for your sprints, the more likely you are to accomplish your objectives. You’ll build better software, that provides more value to your customers. Using templates in Hugo enables you to collaboratively prepare and edit notes, create tasks and integrate with 20+ apps. Next, you’ll want to look at the team’s velocity and capacity together. When determining the team’s velocity, the Scrum Master or Scrum Product Manager should be ready to use examples from the past few sprints or previous projects to indicate how quickly the team usually finishes similar work. Once you have your backlog of items, it’s important to estimate the time or effort it will take to complete each item.

Estimating tasks and determining how many of them can be accomplished in a sprint can be difficult. The more information the team has about their prior performance, their forthcoming capacity, and their definition of ‘Done’, the more confident they can be in their forecast. Agile Planning Boards for Jira can help product owners refine the backlog. You’re able to pull Jira issues from the backlog onto the free-form canvas and visualize them how you want. Make a diagram, stick them in columns, rewrite them, combine them.

You’ve put in the time and effort to build a solid foundation of understanding and have started the actual work—now you can evaluate progress and set the course for the next sprint. Sprint planning is an Agile ritual where the team plans which tasks will be completed in the next sprint. Use this template to review already-prioritized items in the backlog, estimate the capacity of your team for the upcoming sprint, and decide which items from the backlog will be worked on.

First and foremost, it’s a great tool to help keep your team motivated and on track–everyone can stay up-to-date on their progress. But they can also just be general meetings to keep your team up to date throughout the Scrum process, involving questions on workflow, progress and future goals. If you have a difficult time convincing your management to work on technical debt, try focusing on the business impact instead of technical problems.

For our work with Project Beacon, we have a large development team and not much time to spare. We’re making constant updates to the products, both incremental and significant, as the COVID-19 pandemic around us continues to shift the landscape of the world. Sprint planning meetings are a critical part of engineering and creative teams. A sprint planning meeting agenda can greatly facilitate collaborative sessions. The objective of sprint planning meeting is to break up tasks into easily manageable parts that the team can complete.

How Long Is The Sprint Planning Meeting?

During the sprint planning process, you may have a scrum master who helps you groom your product backlog. They are also leading a sprint planning meeting which has its own structure and cadence depending on how closely you follow scrum and agile processes. No matter how you groom your product backlog or run your sprint meetings, the goal is to launch a product on time while minimizing surprises and distractions. The first sprint Sprint planning meeting explanation planning meeting is different from subsequent ones. The best way to set everyone up for success, and avoid the pitfall of under-planning and over-executing, is to do an inventory and collective review of all user stories to make sure we have all expected behavior covered and defined. For us, that involves a methodical process of bringing up each story in a screenshare, and letting everyone read through the acceptance criteria.

The product owner must be prepared, incorporating lessons learned from prior sprint reviews, stakeholder feedback, and the product’s vision. This lets them see the big picture before making important decisions. When done correctly, sprint planning fosters an environment where the team is driven, challenged, and capable of success.

Looking at the backlog of issues may be the starting point in the sprint planning ceremony, but sometimes a new idea for a task will emerge then and there, triggering a new sticky note to go up on the whiteboard. Perhaps there is a story in the backlog that the team wants to complete in the upcoming sprint, but it turns out that your colleague has broken this story down into smaller tasks in their notebook. One factor that’s been on my mind recently is how much time we should dedicate to sprint planning meetings. There are certainly many different ways to run these; the structure depends on the methodology, team size, what point you’re at in the project, and plenty else.

What Is The Purpose Of A Sprint Planning Meeting?

By asking your team these questions about progress, blockers and goals, you are gathering unique insights that can help you improve productivity and cross-functional collaboration. Use ScrumGenius’ meeting template to gather key information on your scrum process from your employees, monitor sprints, and improve your workflow. It is vital to make paying down technical debt – including tasks such as code refactoring and bug fixing – a priority of every single sprint.

This is the heart of the meeting, as this is where the collaboration and negotiation happens. The ScrumMaster should always keep the team focused on the sprint goal and be aware of the time. Once you have defined and estimated the tasks you aim to accomplish in the upcoming sprint, you can use another smart drop zone in Agile Planning Boards to quickly assign those tasks to appropriate team members. You end up with a sized task list, each one properly delegated, as shown below.

Sprint Planning

Ideally, you already have some discussion on the critical concerns you need to consider during this sprint. Identify any new information that may impact the results of your sprint plan. As a nurse, I want to view prescription dosage of current medications so I know what refills to order. As an office administrator, I want to be able to view upcoming appointments so I can let a patient know the date of the next appointment. In an age where the line between physical and virtual worlds is blurring to the point of simply not being there, Agile Planning Boards is the tool Scrum teams need, because it brings the two worlds into the same room.

• These discussions can help get to more effective time estimates.
• As you can see, we always try to build in extra time to account for the “unknown unknowns” and distractions, and we are transparent about that with the client.
• This is also a good opportunity to flag any estimates that seem off now that we have more information.
• Ideally, you already have some discussion on the critical concerns you need to consider during this sprint.
• Fortunately, there are great methods to help you prioritise your product backlog.
• The more information the team has about their prior performance, their forthcoming capacity, and their definition of ‘Done’, the more confident they can be in their forecast.
• Send the reports at an appropriate time weekly (e.g. Thursdays, early afternoon) to give your team enough time to finish the report.

Focus on writing the outcomes of the sprint so that all team members know what they are working towards. Once the overarching goal is set, your team can start filling in the gaps in terms of the tasks that you need to complete to reach those goals. In every sprint plan, focus on writing the «what» , the «how» , and the «who» . Preparing for a scrum planning meeting ensures every stakeholder is informed on how to start working towards launching the product.

Anyone can create a Sprint Planning meeting agenda template using Word, Google Docs, or some other program. But an elegant one will help you get your team on the same page when it comes to the purpose of a sprint. It should also help you raise those actionable takeaways from every meeting, and keep everyone on task while maximizing their time. Whether you estimate backlog items in terms of story points, hours, or some other measure of effort, it’s important to make sure the deliverables and priority of tasks match everyone’s expectations for the week.

Send the reports at an appropriate time weekly (e.g. Thursdays, early afternoon) to give your team enough time to finish the report. Instead, I want to offer practical strategies to make planning a Sprint less painful so that you feel organised rather than overwhelmed and have achievable goals rather than just another staggering list of to-dos. A successful Sprint should leave you feeling like you’ve https://globalcloudteam.com/ worked on things that are important and worthy of your time. The size of each task, often called user stories, which is done using numerical points, hours, comparative sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, etc.), or another means of capturing the effort required. When your team has been working together for quite some time, you’ll have a better understanding and accurate data of how much work the team can do.

Evaluate Progress

The Product Owner is responsible for collating and organising all backlog items that could be worked on during the sprint and is typically referred to as backlog grooming. They may do this alone or at a pre-meeting before the planning and aim to break tasks down into actionable items. A product backlog is a to-do list with user stories, including adding new features, improving existing features and other maintenance activities of a product. It should be constantly updated so the Scrum team has a proper base to draw from. Gather any notes and action items from the sprint planning session. Share this with your team prior to the meeting so they can contribute.

Overview of what can be expected to be delivered during the sprint and how the team plans to achieve this . A quick description of what your team plans to complete throughout the sprint. When estimating, Agile Planning Boards offers fully customizable smart drop zones to take Jira actions, like updating fields, using drag and drop. You could do this live in the office on the big screen or with screen-sharing during a Zoom call, allowing everyone in the meeting to clearly see the decisions being made in real time. Choosing what work gets done involves a negotiation between the team and the product owner about the value of the work and the level of effort required. Determining the level of effort involves estimating, i.e. predicting how long the task will take to complete.

Sprint Retrospective Template

Part of every great sprint planning session is defining what «done» is for the project. This agenda template not only lets you lay out the steps needed to reach your goal, but it also enables your team to start taking action towards it right away. Our sprint planning template allows you to turn any note into an assignable action in any major workflow tool or platform with only a few simple clicks. Your team’s capacity is a measurement of how many story points or backlog items they can complete during a sprint under normal circumstances. To find your team’s capacity, multiply the number of team members by the number of hours they can productively work in a day, subtracting time spent in team meetings or devoted to other tasks or projects.

At the start of a sprint planning session, the product owner and the team collaborate to define a goal for the sprint. The team looks at what items from the product backlog may contribute to that goal, and plans the work necessary to achieve it. With a fast-moving project, carving out time for extensive sprint planning meetings can be a challenge. Here’s how we keep our process as efficient as possible for one of our large product development projects. Generally speaking, the scrum master or the product owner discusses the highest priority tasks and features that team members need to work on. Each team member can also ask questions to clarify the tasks they need to work on.

Product

Your team also needs an agreed-upon definition of Done to avoid more technical debt sneaking in. This template seeks to bring some of the familiar boards in concert with other layouts of data, all in service of efficiently managing biweekly sprints. Having agreement and alignment on what will be completed and how the work will be accomplished helps to provide predictability in planning and visibility for stakeholders. Bring everyone up to date on the team’s plan, goals and progress.

As an office administrator, I want to view past appointments so I can determine the patients’ needs. With Agile Planning Boards, this constant back and forth doesn’t happen. If you write something in your notebook, just take a photo and there it is on your digital canvas. Now that the idea is “on the system”, it can evolve as your thinking changes, no longer frozen in time in your notebook. And when you’re ready to start porting your ideas over to Jira, Agile Planning Boards is a fast, fun, efficient, and highly visual way of doing it.

To accommodate, some software companies have gone so far as to build their entire product on the premise that everything can be a virtual board. And while that model works for some, we must contend with different layouts for different needs. Sometimes our teams like a warm embrace of the spreadsheet grid. While others may cozy up to a charting tool to visually work with their stuff.

The point of it is to define what can be achieved in the sprint, and how that work will be delivered. Sprint planning is about gathering the necessary people together to determine the product development goal and work you will do in your upcoming sprint. But before you get to a planning meeting, there’s a reasonable amount of prep you need to do to organise. There’s a drop-down menu to select the different sprints you defined in Step 2.

This template gives different stakeholders the ability to customize the views of their tasks. Don’t perfectly sequence user stories at this point (you’ll do that during a different planning process). This is for planning purposes only, so group them in order of priority. If you held an asynchronous discussion to review your backlog items, your team is already familiar with the list and has a good idea of the priorities, making your meeting run smoother.

Get verbal confirmation from your team about the next steps to be taken. Clarify who on the team is completing them and when they should be done by.

Sprints are sections of work with defined goals and deliverables broken out into digestible pieces to fit the capacity of the team. Sprints can last anywhere from a week-long to a month, and this allows for teams to quickly pivot should changes occur. Our meeting note template empowers your team to move through each step efficiently and effectively, maintaining your team’s velocity. Prior to every sprint , make sure you have established a specific product vision and prioritization on what needs to be done. In addition, choose goals and objectives for the upcoming sprint. Sprint planning involves trying to achieve a balance between too much and too little.