Sprint Planning Meeting Roles, Process, and Best Practices Aha! software

This sprint goal defines what your team is trying to accomplish during the sprint and will give your developers direction. By illustrating what that particular item does, your team will understand the feature in full and can decide if it’s necessary to implement it. Once your developers have shared their calendars, it’s easy to see how much time they can devoteto the sprint in the upcoming period. Before planning your next sprint, you’d do well to begin the meeting with a review of the previous one.

This part also covers a review of the original sprint goal and which product backlog items were part of the sprint. A sprint review is crucial to the overall product development process. Without it, scrum teams may lose out on the chance to assess the product and adapt accordingly. Feedback from key stakeholders is crucial to achieving the goals laid out in the product vision statement. OK, not the entire company, but the entire development team must attend. This includes the product owner, scrum master, developers, and quality engineers.

An agenda for effective sprint planning meetings

When these external factors occur, you’re automatically left with less time to complete your workload. In other words, it’s a good idea to invest in documentation software that is easy to update and edit. Atlassian’sConfluenceis a popular option used by many companies worldwide. Per this visual, your developers are more likely to rememberwhat you tell them in direct, face-to-face interactions. Congratulate your developers on what they did accomplish, and get them excited for what’s ahead. They’re sure to remain motivatedand will likely tackle the next sprint in high spirits.

The sprint review should foster team collaboration and evaluate whether progress is being made toward realizing the product vision. Otherwise, the meeting can devolve into rote presentations and your team will miss out on important opportunities to gather feedback. The sprint review is part of the scrum framework for product development and management.

How close are we to hitting our sprint goals? What’s your comfort level?

You might want to start distributing tasksimmediately, but there’s no point in doing so without knowing your team members’ schedules. One method for this is with a meeting recording tool like Otter. This resource turns voice conversations into smart notes, making it perfect for keeping track of meeting minutes. This will help team members to feel motivated in what they’re doing and will encourage them to take responsibility for their work. Giving each team member the opportunity to talk is hugely important. Reinforce this at the start of each scrum if you find that certain team members have a tendency to ramble on.

• However, you also know that everyone attends an hour-long meeting twice a week.
• Sprints are part of the popular scrum framework used for project management in agile organizations.
• The primary purpose of sprint planning is to decide what needs to be done and who will be doing it.
• They’re sure to remain motivatedand will likely tackle the next sprint in high spirits.

After determining your team’s overall capacity, identify how many tasks your team can take on and how quickly it can complete them. Again,oth your estimates and your notes regarding past performance can help here. When doing a sprint session, most teams establish their velocity and determine how they’ll measure it. This will be completely unique to your team, but a great way to figure out your goal is to look back at past sprint sessions and use that as a measuring stick. What does it consist of, and how far are these projects from completion? Please note to ask your team about which stage the backlog projects are in and a projection of when they expect to finish.

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A big part of the agile and scrum frameworks is learning how to deal with changing circumstances without losing momentum, and teams can’t learn that if they’re rigidly micromanaged. Any notes you and your team make during the meeting are time-stamped too, so you’ll always be able to go back and get the full context from the recording. It’s the responsibility of the scrum master to make sure that this time-boxing is followed by everyone on the team.

Developers break up backlog items into work items of one day or less, to be picked up in the daily scrum. However, since it’s also unrealistic to expect your team to be 100% productive the entire time sprint planning agenda they work, you can’t go by this ideal number. Instead, you’ll need to estimate how productive they are on average. If you believe they are 90% productive, then multiply your ideal capacity by 0.90.

Sprint Review Meeting Agenda Template

How do members of a development team prepare for the sprint planning meeting? A development team may contain designers, user experience experts, quality assurance, and developers, of course. Larger companies can have different roles shared between different development teams. However, for this post, we only consider the simpler case when we have one development team dedicated to one product. Reminding the team that they’re all working hard towards the same goal is crucial.

Instead, use the team’s retrospective to understand any issues that are impacting morale. Teams that respond quickly to culture and development concerns are happier, more productive, and write better code. Team MeetingsCollaborate on meeting agendas, take notes in real-time, and end every team meeting with an action plan.

What was completed last sprint? (5 minutes)

It’s also critical information for planning your next sprint because you’ll have a better understanding of your team’s bandwidth and how much new work you can assign. During sprint planning, the team works together to determine a goal for the sprint and then individuals commit to work they plan to accomplish towards it. A good sprint planning meeting provides structure, sets expectations, and defines clear outcomes that help everyone on the team feel motivated and successful. Like any good meeting, an effective sprint planning meeting needs an agenda. The agenda is straight forward, but will keep your team focused and the meeting on track.

Use it to review goals, define your scope and make decisions collaboratively. It is a living document, constantly getting edited and improved. It lists all the features, use cases, user stories, improvements, and bug fixes that are being made to future releases. The first step to sprint planning is to https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ know what you want to achieve – in the next 6 months, in a year and so on. The purpose of estimating velocity is to develop a new velocity for every sprint. Looking back at past sprints will help reflect on objectives, outcomes and effectiveness, and set realistic expectations for the upcoming sprint.

Other daily scrum meeting tips:

This gives the team time and space to dig into the acceptance criteria and fully understand the effort without the added pressure of figuring it out immediately. This can also surface tradeoffs related to complexities or dependencies, which may need to be evaluated before estimating or committing to the work. Below are some key distinctions between the sprint review and sprint retrospective ceremonies. A sprint review is an event that occurs right before the sprint retrospective.