A Quick Checklist for Sprint Planning
Without sound scrum sprint planning, a sprint cannot be successful. If done properly, sprint planning meetings can not only signal the start of a new sprint but also give Scrum teams a renewed sense of purpose and structure, reduce unforeseen setbacks, and establish the benchmark by which work will be completed during the sprint.
Here, we’ll go over how to organize and conduct a successful sprint planning meeting, ensuring that your team can work together and make the necessary plans to lay the foundation for a fruitful and satisfying sprint.
Look Back At The Last Sprint
Analyzing your prior work is the first step in any good project. By doing this, you can greatly improve the efficacy of your scrum sprint planning and increase team output. You must ask yourself the following questions.
Did Every Item On The Backlog Get Finished?
Likely, some items weren’t completed if sprint planning wasn’t good enough earlier. You should think about them if you have them.
You need to finish them first, though. Determine why the tasks weren’t completed by evaluating them. Was it because your team wasn’t working efficiently enough, or was it because you didn’t divide the task into manageable chunks?
Is it incomplete because you gave the task to the wrong person, or is it incomplete because it depends on another task that hasn’t been finished yet? Provide answers to these queries and bring them up privately or during the meeting.
How Numerous Are Your Problems?
Analyze the number of errors and bugs that your previous scrum sprint planning contained. You must address a recurring error if you want the team’s productivity to increase.
Have some tasks failed to be completed properly because you provided inadequate instructions? Did the tasks get completed, but the team wasn’t in agreement on what constituted “done”?
This, along with the time your team spent attending meetings, bug-fixing, and other non-work-related activities, should give you a clearer picture of what’s happening.
What Was The Velocity Of Your Team?
If you aren’t already using one of the many tools available to measure your team’s velocity, you should do so immediately. If a team performs poorly, even without the aid of a tool, you can infer that its velocity is lower than anticipated.
Some teams work at incredibly different rates. On various projects, some teams will exhibit different velocities. Giving a team exactly the amount of work they can handle in a scrum sprint planning is the key to success.
Update The Situation
The never-ending stream of bug fixes and feature additions makes it simple to get lost. However, this causes you to lose sight of the customers’ satisfaction as the project’s main objective.
You must understand the context if you want to accomplish this.
Refresh User Stories
Are your user stories written well? If they are, you must regularly update them. Keep your user stories current and add new ones if you need to move the product backlog forward.
Introduce New Projects
Correcting new bugs won’t keep any project under control. You must continue implementing new features. This is why you need to collaborate with the project owner and look at the product features they plan to add next.
Take into account the user stories that outline the desired features in terms that your team can understand. Work on specification draughts, identify important tasks and calculate how long it will take your team to complete each one.
Speak With Influential Individuals
You are the go-between for the client and the software development team, and you are aware of the two parties you must speak with. Before the meeting, discuss the following with them.
Update the owner
Inform the owner of your current problems and the progress you made during the last sprint.
Inquire about their order of importance for the tasks in the upcoming sprint. The next step is for you to present this to the team.
Consult The Group
Give the team the tasks and ask them to bring estimates to the meeting. This enables sprint planning meeting to go much more smoothly and quickly.
Ensure that everyone is aware of the meeting’s time and is at ease arriving on time.
Hold The Conference
Some claim that it is better to have more sprint planning meeting agenda. Even more, according to this Forbes expert, productivity is increased by keeping workers interested every day.
This may work for some teams, but many people will feel that you micromanage them and don’t trust them enough. Monitoring the progress and taking 30 minutes out of your day for a meeting are two entirely different things.
The sprint planning meetings should use the same time-saving strategy. The final item on the checklist is holding the meeting, for this reason.
The more information you have in advance, the less time everyone will need to spend in meetings and the more time they will have to work on the project.
What you ought to talk about is this:
The What
It’s not simple to decide what to do during the upcoming sprint. The owner aspires to the highest degree. The teams’ strategies are different. Some teams would object, while others would agree to any number of tasks to end a tedious meeting.
This is why, as the mediator, you should work to quickly reach an understanding between the team and the project owner regarding the tasks at hand.
Sort tasks according to urgency by giving them top priority. Ask your team to complete them as soon as possible and keep them at the top of the list.
Each user story should be broken down into a series of tasks. Ideally, you must have already completed this; all you need now is the team’s input on your ideas and approval of the sprint’s set of tasks.
Ask your team to estimate how long it will take them to finish each task. If the team had a recent slump in performance, you might need to increase that figure by about a quarter.
The How
Once you know the list of tasks you must complete during the following sprint, you must decide how to accomplish them. In essence, this entails providing an answer to the question “Who does what when?”
Make sure all tasks are realistic and testable, and that their descriptions are accurate.
Choose the method you think will work best for distributing story points. To ensure that everyone on the team agrees on how difficult each task is, consult the entire team.
Sort the work promptly. Put the highest priorities first, and collaborate with the team to identify any crucial dependencies that might impede development.
Give specific tasks to those who can complete them most effectively. Give easier tasks to team members with less experience, and difficult ones to middle or senior engineers.
Decide on each task’s acceptance criteria in advance to avoid later disagreements about whether or not the task is finished.
If testing is carried out by in-house employers, assign testing tasks.
Include bug fixes as something that consumes at least 25% of the total working hours.
Start your work.
Take Note Of Your Errors
Nothing you plan for a sprint will go perfectly the first time. To make corrections during the subsequent planning event, you must keep an eye out for the mistakes you and your team are making.
Conclusion
With these types and tricks it will be easier for you to create your checklist in the right manner and if you want to get a professional certification for this then you should consider taking certified scrum master training from Universal Agile and become an extraordinary scrum master.