What Is A Sprint Planning Meeting?A sprint planning meeting is one of the Scrum ceremonies widely adopted by teams who utilize sprints to mark when work “begins” and “ends.” It is designed to answer the questions, What can be delivered in this next sprint? And how will we accomplish that work?
To put it simply, the sprint planning meeting should provide structure, set expectations, and define the backlog for the upcoming sprint.
There are several people involved in these meetings, and it is a very collaborative effort. Let’s break down what each role does.
The 3 scrum roles: product owner, scrum master, development team
The ScrumMasterThe ScrumMaster facilitates the sprint planning meeting and ensures that meeting rooms are booked, supplies are available, people are prepared, and all video conferencing and other connectivity details are ready to go. In terms of scheduling, the ScrumMaster should be timeboxing this meeting according to the length of the sprint. For example, if the team is working in 2 week sprints, the sprint planning meeting should between 2-4 hours. The ScrumMaster must manage time appropriately to make sure that there is complete alignment on the sprint goal before the meeting wraps up.
The Product OwnerThe Product Owner is responsible for ensuring that all items in the backlog are prepared before the meeting. They must clarify details on each product backlog item and be a resource to the team when asking questions around use case or acceptance criteria. This is arguably the most important meeting for a Product Owner & one they must set aside plenty of time for to prepare.
The Development TeamObviously, the people doing the work will need to be in the sprint planning meeting. Designers, developers, test engineers—anyone who will contribute to the work product—needs to be in attendance and actively participate in this meeting so that they can walk away with a solid understanding of what’s expected of them and what is priority to work on over the next sprint.
Keep in mind that teams get better at sprint planning with time. If a team is newly formed (or new to the agile methodology), there may not be as much shared understanding on how much can get done within each sprint. Later, we’ll talk about calculating velocity. Just keep in mind that mature teams tend to do better at this. There’s an element of constant improvement with agile, so give yourself some grace if your first sprint planning meeting did not go as well as you had hoped!
Why Should You Run A Sprint Planning Meeting?Why run a sprint planning meeting? Because it is a great opportunity to get the whole team together and collaborate to establish what everyone is responsible for over the next sprint! From a personal perspective it was difficult for our team to identify what exactly they were working on each sprint, and – more importantly why – before we adopted this agile practice. Since then, it’s been much easier for our team to work together and feel more confident about what we’re supposed to deliver.
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