Sprint Planning Guide – Corporate Hellion

This is part of a short series on scrum ceremonies and I’ve done some short pieces for each one. Here’s the complete list:

Attendees

Project Manager/Scrum Master
Product Owner
Developers
QA

Like in Backlog Grooming, it’s important your Product Owner is present for at least the tail end of Sprint Planning to confirm the items committed to in the next arbitrary chunk of time match his or her priorities for the project.

How-to: Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is a heck of a lot easier if the backlog is organised first, so go ahead and check out the Backlog Grooming Guide if you haven’t already.

1. Assess the team’s capacity

Start with a general check-in with your team. Is everybody looking okay? Does anybody on your team have a dentist appointment, vacation scheduled, or a kid’s dance recital to go to? Is anybody feeling tired or burned out? These are important factors to take into account when planning for the capacity of your team.

2. Choose items from the backlog for your next sprint

Starting from the top, grab your first card – whether that’s in Jira, Trello, or handwritten on an index card – and drop it into your next sprint, assigning it to team members as you go.

Keep an eye on the workload and dependencies on each team member to make sure no one person is over or underloaded. As a scrum master, it is vitally important that you prevent your team from overcommitting and the subsequent burnout, or undercommitting and then getting bored or feeling unappreciated.

3. Commit to the sprint

Once you’ve filled up your sprint backlog with stuff, do a final check with the team to make sure they can commit to the current workload. If everything checks out, you’re good to go!