Introduction
Traditional project delivery methodologies involved planning everything upfront with a great amount of details and certainty. However, this could later prove to become chaotic as changes in requirements or priority could not be handled effectively because of the amount of time spent for the same.
Agile ways of working could to a great extent solve this problem with the mindset of just enough planning and delivering a small chunk of work. When it comes to planning in agile, there are several levels of planning like, Portfolio level, Program level, Milestone level, Sprint level and daily level planning with the focus on just enough. The outcomes are delivered through fixed time cadences which are called Iterations or Sprints. Every cadence starts with a ceremony where the intention is to plan for that particular cadence only! And that ceremony is nothing but a Sprint Planning/Iteration planning meeting. But, many teams make it just a ceremony and it becomes a monotonous process without making it effective thus diluting the purpose of agile sprint planning. In this blog, the main aim is to learn, explore and understand:
- What is Sprint planning and what is the main intent behind doing it?
- How to effectively do a sprint planning meeting?
- What is the purpose of sprint planning
- How to timebox the sprint planning meeting?
- How does Spring Planning help the team?
Introduction to Sprint Planning
Sprint planning is one of the ceremonies a scrum team does to basically decide what increment will be delivered in the upcoming sprint/iteration. This is where the team aligns on priorities, defining the goal and proper direction is set to the team.
What is sprint planning?
Sprint planning is the first ceremony of any sprint at the offset of which the sprint officially starts. This is a timebox ceremony (4 Hours for a 2 week Sprint) where the team:
- Plan for the upcoming sprint
- Define what is the objective or the goal of the sprint
- Prioritiseh work items
- Plan how they are going to execute the plan
The entire scrum team with PO, SM and the development teams come together to plan their work for the next cadence.
Why is sprint planning important?
- Sprint Planning sets the direction to the team. It aligns everyone, the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developers to agree and decide what is most important to deliver so that the team focussed on delivering highest value work first
- It increases the predictability of the delivery by committing to the sprint goal as per what the team can in their capacity
- Everyone in the team share their solution, plan collectively in the planning meeting and pull work based on their strengths which promotes collaboration and accountability
How to structure a sprint planning meeting?
The only agenda for an agile sprint planning meeting is to ensure that the team is aligned, and have a collective plan to meet the goal and there is a sprint backlog ready. Below is a typical structure of a sprint planning meeting for a two weeks sprint:
- Context Setting : 5-10 mins where the Scrum Master can set the agenda, norms and expectations
- Define and review the Sprint goal : 10-15 mins where the Product Owner narrates and explains the sprint goal and get consensus
- Review the backlog : 40-50 mins where the Product Owner explains the story, acceptance criteria and NFRs
- Task creation : 60-90 mins where the teams break down stories into doable action items and pull work for themselves
- Risks/Dependencies: 10-15 mins where SM collates and notes down all the dependencies and risks
- Final Commitment : 10-15 mins where the entire team agrees on the Sprint backlog
How to do Sprint Planning?
Sprint planning is the first ceremony with which a sprint officially starts. The end output of a planning meeting is a concrete Sprint Backlog. There are various steps involved in a planning meeting to reach a state where the team has a direction for next 10 days, below are those steps in sequence:
The Sprint Planning Meeting
First set the context of the meeting to the entire audience on:
- The agenda of the meeting
- Norms and expectations from the meeting
- Quick review of the previous sprint’s achievements and spillovers
Start with the big picture
Sprint goals are one of the key aspects of good sprint planning. Use SMART goals, OKRs etc which helps teams in drafting an effective sprint goal that will help motivate the team and bring alignment and focus to the planning. Sprint goals should tell the team:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Why are we trying to achieve?
- Who’s problem are we trying to solve?
- How are we going to measure its success?
Review prioritised Work items with acceptance criteria
In order to meet the sprint goal, a PO would have already come up with work items along with their respective acceptance criteria. PO is expected to explain the stories/work items which will help the team in achieving the goal in detail and resolve all the team’s doubts and give utmost clarity to ensure the solution fits the requirements.
Confirm team capacity
Calculate the team capacity for the total number of people in your team. Ideally this is something the SM should come prepared with for the planning. Consider the leaves and holidays in the sprint and use the formula,
Sprint Capacity = Number of people * Number of story points/hours per person * Number of days
Discuss velocity
If the teams have historical data available for the number of story points burnt in the last 3 sprints, then calculate the velocity and this helps in planning your sprint even more precisely.
Average Velocity = Total story points burnt in last 3 sprints / 3
Let’s say a team has burnt 30, 25 and 35 Story points in the last 3 sprints, the average velocity is around 30 Sps and the team can take up to 30+/-3 Sps.
Break down items into tasks
One of the main steps of sprint planning is breaking down work items into doable action items. It is important for the development team to understand and derive what contribution goes into finishing a work item. These doable action items are nothing but tasks. This tells us who is contributing in the work item and what is the contribution.
Example of Tasks for a login story could include:
- API development
- UI Integration
- Test case creation
Estimate the work
This part can give the teams on what they can commit to and what not to. Once the tasks are derived, the next step is to estimate each and every work item with man hours/story points or whatever framework of estimation the team uses. With this, there could be a fair bit of an idea of what could potentially be the increment in the sprint.
Assign tasks
Agile ways of working promotes pull culture rather than someone assigning the work. Once the estimates for the tasks are done, it is time for the team to add their names to the tickets which they will be working on. This should also give a direction to all the team members as to what their work in the sprint will be.
Document concerns and dependencies
Once the tasks are estimated, and pulled by the development team, the next step is to ensure all the risks and dependencies are mapped to appropriate work items. Almost all project management tools have a way to capture dependencies, in general, ensure:
- Risks/dependencies are linked to the ticket which is blocked
- Capture basic details like assignee, expected date for resolution and a brief description of the dependency
Reach a consensus
The last step in a scrum sprint planning is to align with:
- The sprint goal decided
- Work items committed based on the capacity
- Assigned tasks
- Plan to resolve dependency and risks
With this, once you hit the “Start Sprint” button in your project management tool, your sprint planning is complete and your sprint has started.
Purpose of Sprint Planning
Sprint planning sets the direction for the upcoming sprint by deciding what work will be delivered and how it will be done so and that is the whole intent or purpose of the ceremony. In order to achieve this agenda, from an output perspective, sprint planning also helps teams in achieving the following:
Determining the Sprint Goal
Sprint goals give teams a clear cut purpose or direction for the teams to focus in a sprint. It brings alignment within the team and shared outcomes which in turn helps teams in decision making and execution.
Selecting Product Backlog Items
- Sprint planning helps teams in identifying the most valuable items which are prioritized based on business goals and customer needs
- Helps in choosing work items which contribute to an outcome driven sprint goal
- Also helps teams select a realistic amount of work that the team can commit to based on capacity / velocity
Creating a Sprint Backlog
One of the main outputs of a sprint planning meeting is to create a sprint backlog that is the aligned commitment of what work items they have picked to solve for the sprint goal. Sprint backlog consists of work items, actionable doable tasks which are estimated and ownership identified for the same. Sprint backlog helps teams in visualising the work during the sprint execution as well.
Planning the Work
Teams during sprint planning discuss and explore solutions for the requirements. That is they go through all the requirements in detail along with the PO and explore and discuss possible solutions and pick the best fit. While they do this, they also discuss in detail as to what could block the development, what risks they could come across along with when they would want it resolved. This helps the team plan their next sprint in detail and gives everyone a clear understanding of who should work on what and when.
Key Aspects of Sprint Planning
Sprint planning is the first ceremony with which the sprint starts, while the above section explains the purpose and the best practice, let’s have a look at some key aspects of the ceremony:
- Timeboxed – Every ceremony in a sprint is timeboxed. Timeboxed ensures team members are focussed and achieve their agenda without getting disgraced. Sprint planning is timeboxed usually for about 8 hours for a 4 week sprint, 4 hours for a 2 week sprint and 2 hours for a 1 week sprint
- Collaborative – Although PO, SM and Development team members are expected to play their specific roles in the planning meeting, the whole exercise of it is collaborative in nature. That means there is no one person calling shots, there is no one person who is assigning work, not one person who is solutioning. All decisions are made together
- Focus on Short-Term Work – With specific outcome oriented business or user need and work items which are well defined, small in scope and ready to be worked upon, sprint planning promotes just enough planning to a great extent
Benefits of Sprint Planning
Sprint planning helps teams in a lot of ways like, starting with clear direction, understanding the priorities and making a realistic plan. Along with these points sprint planning helps teams in:
- Improved Focus – With clearly defined sprint goals and prioritizing only the most important work sprint planning reduces distractions and ensures the efforts are on delivering high value outcomes
- Enhanced Communication – While planning, teams understand the goals, align with the priorities, plan the solutions, commit together, identify bottlenecks. These decisions and discussions are happening together which ensures that everyone in the team are on the same page
- Increased Agility – Sprint planning happens every sprint. This helps teams to quickly respond to feedback from the customer or even changing requirements. This pivoting allows teams to be become more responsive and increase agility
Conclusion
A lot of teams dilute the intent of a sprint planning meeting by just making it a checklist meeting because they are running sprints. They just ensure there are tasks, and they are assigned to the team without calculating the team capacity. Now, with these antipatterns and misconceptions, teams do not reap the full benefits of the ceremony. Seek support from an external agile consulting service company if you are unable to solve this problem.
It is crucial for everyone in the team to understand sprint planning is not just a meeting, it’s a focussed, collaborative foundation which helps teams plan for their next cadence. By defining an outcome driven goal, breaking the requirements, committing to a realistic work and to commonly agree is the main intent of the ceremony. Timeboxing in sprint planning is also essential to ensure that focus or intent is not lost. And where there is one person calling the shots, sprint planning makes no sense. It is a collaborative ceremony which helps increase agility within the teams by focussing on small high value increments.
With this, our blog on “Sprint Planning: How to Run Effective Sprints?” comes to an end. We hope this has helped our readers to understand the true essence of sprint planning. We would be glad to discuss your unique agility adoption bottlenecks at Benzne Agile Transformation consulting and support your agile journey. Please write to us at consult@benzne.com for any feedback or suggestions.
Frequently Asked Questions on Sprint Planning
1. What is the main goal of sprint planning?
The main goal of sprint planning is to define, derive and plan work for the upcoming sprint. Captured below:
- What to deliver? – Sprint goal and work items
- How to deliver? – Tasks and estimates
- Realistic Commitment from the team based on the capacity and confidence
2. Who is responsible for sprint planning in Scrum?
Every member of the scrum team plays an important role in contributing to the sprint planning. It is a collective and collaborative effort.
- PO sets the tone with sprint goal and the work items
- Dev team breaks the work items, estimates and commits based on capacity
- SM facilitates the ceremony and help teams plan effectively
3. How long should a sprint planning meeting last?
Sprint planning meetings are timeboxed and ensure team members are focussed and achieve their agenda without getting disgraced. Sprint planning is timeboxed usually for about 8 hours for a 4 week sprint, 4 hours for a 2 week sprint and 2 hours for a 1 week sprint.
4. How do you calculate team capacity for sprint planning?
- Calculate the productive hours / story points per person per sprint
- Subtract time for sprint meetings and other random meetings
- Identify if there are holidays
- Calculate the leaves for everyone in the team
- Use the formula – Number of people * Number of story points/hours per person * Number of days
Example: Consider a team of 5 people with no leaves planned in that sprint but there is a holiday in the sprint. And each person can contribute to 1 Sp per day (6h) the total capacity for the team would be, 5*1*9 = 45 Sps
5. What happens if a sprint plan fails mid-sprint?
In case mid sprint the team realises that the plan was not efficient, we recommend the teams to do the following which has worked in our experience as an agile consulting company:
- Quickly assess the problem
- Re check if the goal can be achieved
- Repriotize and negotiate scope to ensure the sprint goal can be still met
- Inform stakeholders proactively about the delays and changes
- Carefully check the plan for the remaining days of the sprint to ensure there are not surprises
