Sprint planning is one of the main tasks that can ensure that Agile initiatives are successfully implemented. If done right, it would help ensure that each team member gives you the dedication and buy-in to produce the content to the best of their abilities. The sprint preparation session is a joint meeting where the team determines the scale of customer stories, breaks down stories into assignments and agrees to execute these stories within a sprint according to their “definition of done” and agreed upon.
Few aspects are as important as running a sprint training meeting well performed. Get it right, and you’ll be delivering quality apps to your destination. Get it wrong, and it’s going to snowball into a huge mess.
The definition of success in product development is unclear. The impropriety is transparent. Yet defects are evident. Inefficiencies riddle market planning workflows as departments, resources, and systems misalign. It can be the first step to streamlining the growth phase by holding a successful sprint planning meeting.
A sprint planning meeting ceremony is meaningful because it aligns the production team with the commodity owner. Like other relationships, coordination and consistency are needed in the one among you and your team. And what good strategy is to take the opportunity to relax down to assure the staff knows the goals and they can do them?
This article will lead you through 5 steps you can take any time you have a sprint preparation meeting. It is the only example which you would ever need.
Step 1: Evaluate Your Product Roadmap
An agile sprint is aimed at delivering improved applications. Yet it is said better than finished. When you’re knee-deep in code changes, it’s simple to lose vision of the bigger image. How do you do the correct thing about what you’re concentrating on?
As the product owner, you must still have a high-level vision of the work in mind. You have to check the project roadmap and urge critical questions before discussing or doing some form of sprint preparation.
Are you designing features that drive your vision for the product forward? Can you have a view of the work, or are you just responding to noisy consumers? The first step in sprint preparation is to decide where you want to be in 6 months, a year, or longer, not just after this sprint.
Step 2: Have an Updated List of User Stories Before the Sprint Planning Meeting
In an ideal, transparent environment, the team will pick up the words you have written about users a month ago and quickly start working on them. That’s rarely the case.
Your users would have been requesting for many functionalities to be added to your product after your last update. You will have to take in all these factors to make adjustments to the customer stories to make sure they are tested before heading into the preparation meeting for sprints.
Now the dilemma most teams have is, “how many customer stories are we going to update?” The perfect scenario is to update them all. But, unless the product is relatively new and thin, that is an unlikely feat.
Step 3: Meeting Arrangements
Send the invite and make sure that all your teammates are able to attend the meeting without any inconvenience.
Print the target of the sprint and position it somewhere conspicuous in the conference space. Have freely available sticky notes in various colors.
Write down team speed in bold letters. Write down a reference rate (agreed upon by everyone), which may be the last sprint speed or an average of the previous three sprints. It will help if you use a comparison velocity of 8 story points per programmer per sprint if it’s the first sprint for your team.
Ensure that it is obvious what each sticky color reflects. For starters, green is for stories about people, blue is for tasks, and purple is for bugs. Get the stories written on the stickies and place them in preference order on the wall. Be sure to do the same with remote teams, like in the sprint or backlog.
Also, arrange light refreshments or coffee and make sure that the environment is comfortable.
Step 4: Utilize Data and Expertise to Supercharge Your Sprint Planning Conference
The sprint preparation meeting(s) will set the tone for the following few working weeks or months. The more planning you can do in advance, the better.
That’s why the Scrum Guide recommends timeboxing the sprint preparation meeting for a month-long sprint to just 8 hours. Your schedules should be changed accordingly for faster sprints. Your scrum master is accountable for ensuring these discussions happen and the team is sticking to the list.
Step 5: Collaboratively Plan a Sprint Backlog
It’s time to worry about the “how” you’re going to do it with a sprinting target in mind.
Sprint Backlog is a list of several user stories that you have updated in the previous steps and predicted. The challenge is to find a list of user accounts, assignments, and glitches that can help you accomplish the goal and can be achieved within the sprint’s span.
The team must choose the sprint things and scale of the sprint backlog collectively. Since they are the individuals who contribute to the fulfillment of the products, they also have to be the ones who pick what they contribute.
Conclusion
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, renowned as a French writer and pioneering aviator, did write:
“One goal without a timetable is merely a hope.”
Proper sprint training does a great deal of good. But above all, it turns your ambitions into a step-by-step roadmap from a wish. If you have followed this tutorial, so you and your whole team can walk away with it after your sprint training session.
To learn more about sprint planning and other Agile methodologies, it is recommended to pursue a certification course from us at Invensis Learning.
That’s it, guys! We have reached the end of this article. Finally, some of the popular Agile Certification Courses that would interest you are:
- Scrum Master Certification Training
- CSPO Course
- SAFe Scrum Master Certification Training
- Agile Scrum Foundation Certification Training
- Agile Scrum Master Certification Training
- PRINCE2 Agile Foundation Certification Training
