Sprint Planning

The purpose of the Sprint is to turn a set of the product backlog into an increment of potentially shippable product functionality. The Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team meet prior to every Sprint to determine what product functionality the team will work on. The product owner presents the product backlog and the team selects what it believes it can build during the Sprint.

The Sprint Planning Meeting consists of two parts, each lasting up to four hours:

1. Backlog selection - the Product Owner presents the highest priority backlog to the development team. They collaborate about how much can be turned into an increment of potentially shippable product functionality during the next Sprint. The team selects as much as they believe they can handle.
2. Sprint workload planning - the team defines the architecture and design of the functionality that it has selected, and then defines the work, or tasks, to build that functionality during the next Sprint.

The time Sprint Planning should be scaled depending on the length of the Sprint, with a two week Sprint requiring no more than a total of 4 hours.

Key aspects of Sprint Planning:

• Product Owner reprioritises the product backlog
• The Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team meet to determine the work that can be completed in the next sprint.
• Work is selected from the top of the priority list by the Team.
• The Team obtains as much detail as necessary from the Product Owner and stakeholders (including customers or customer representatives) so that they can estimate what is feasible for the next sprint.
• The Product Owner is responsible for negotiating or taking decisions over any contention between stakeholder input so that the Team work to a single set of priorities.
• The Product Owner and the Team establish a goal for the sprint
• The Team is expected to select only work which they can commit to finishing
• Selected items are broken down into sprint backlog tasks
• Team estimation is informed by performance on previous sprints, capacity for the forthcoming sprint and the relative complexity of the tasks required to deliver the Sprint Goal.
• If the Sprint requires >20% more work during the Sprint than was planned by the second day after the Sprint Planning meeting, it needs to plan better. This is something to address in the Sprint Retrospective.