The Essence of Sprint Planning

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Starting Right!
Your Guide to Effective
Sprint Planning

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Speaker Introduction – Sanjay Kumar
• Trainer with iZenBridge Consultancy:
• Certified Scrum Developer (CSD)
• Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
• Corporate trainings on Agile, Scrum, XP, Kanban
• 15+ years of software development experience
• Companies – TCS, Actuate, Keane, Deutsche Bank, et al
• Roles – Developer, Consultant, Tech Lead, Manager, Scrum Master
• Team Settings – Local, Global, Big, Small and Silo
• Technologies – Java/J2EE, PL/SQL
• Experience with Agile – 2006 onwards
• Agile Certifications – CSM, CSD, CSP, PMI-ACP, SAFe Agilist

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Session Agenda
Need for Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning Pre-requisites
Key Steps in Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning Challenges
The Bottom-Line
Q & A

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Need for Sprint Planning

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The Benefits of Agility
Faster time to market
Responsiveness to change
Self managing teams
Sustainable pace of development
Minimize process waste

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How to Achieve Agility
Progressive planning and development with an aim to release early
and often:
Limit work in progress
Build quality in
Faster feedback loops
Collaboration
Continuous Improvement

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Motivations for Sprint Planning
Helps teams balance ‘predictability’ and ‘adaptability’:
Progressive planning
o Progressive elaboration
o Progressive development
Release early and often
Limiting work in progress
Faster feedback cycle
Collaboration
o Team planning the work must be same as team that does the work

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Pre-requisites for Sprint Planning
Refined product backlog
Cross-functional team
Whole team
An expert facilitator

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Sprint Planning Process

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Sprint Planning Steps
1. Understand the stories
2. Pick stories for development
3. Plan each story for development
4. Closing the Sprint Planning

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Step 1 – Understand the Stories
Acceptance Criteria
• What needs to be done?
Story estimates
• Effort involved
• Complexity
• Uncertainty

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Step 2 – Pick stories for development
How much the team can plan to do in a Sprint depends on:
Historic velocity
Team capacity in the current Sprint (hours)
• Holidays
• Personal leaves
• Part-timers vs. full-timers
• Ideal day vs. an actual day
How the planning unfolds

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Step 3 – Plan Each Story for Development
1. Is the story ready for development?
o Technical capabilities
o External dependencies
o Internal dependencies
2. High level design discussion
3. List of tasks that need to be done
o Refer definition of done (DoD)
o Vertical slicing vs. horizontal slicing
4. Task allocation
o Assignment and estimation – Push vs. Pull

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Sprint Planning Board – Sample
Team
Member
Total
Capacity
Story 1 Capacity
After
Story 1
Story 2 Capacity
After
Story 2
… Final
Capacity
A 48 Task1 42 Task1 36 5
B 48 Task2 40 40 8
C 48 48 Task2 48 -2
D 42 Task3 36 Task3 30 10
E 36 36 Task4 28 4
… … … …

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Step 4 – Closing the Sprint Planning
1. Sprint Goal
2. Fist of Five

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Sprint Planning Challenges

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Sprint Planning Challenges
 Team fails to understand the story in its entirety
 Members do not self-volunteer for tasks
 Members over-estimate their tasks
 Team misses several key tasks
 The task allocation is not Pull-based
 The meeting takes too long

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The Bottom Line
 Sprint Planning should not be the FIRST time team sees a
requirement
 Team must estimate work – stories and tasks
 Keep design discussions to high level only
 Facilitate pull-based task allocation
 Gauge team confidence before closing – Fist of Five!

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