How to plan a Sprint

Sprint Planning or Sprint Grooming is one of the key ceremonies of Scrum and are meetings where teams plan and estimate the work that will be conducted in a Sprint in order to complete an objective.

In order to be able to discuss the objective and body of work that will be executed as part of the Sprint, your initiative must have a Backlog to select from.

This Backlog must be updated periodically to reflect the reality of the project - this process is known as Backlog grooming.

Talk to your client or leadership to identify the progress that they would like to see as part of the Sprint.

Frame this progress as an objective and select the tickets from the Backlog that are required for this objective to be completed.

As a team, discuss the objective, user stories (tasks) and agile user stories (subtasks) required to complete the objective.

Subsequently, in the form of a team conversation:

• Define how many points or time to assign to each task or subtask.
• Define the approach to executing the tasks or subtasks.
• Define who is responsible for what.

Please note that this process should be personalized for each team. Some teams prefer to not assign tickets (i.e. tasks and subtasks) to members and to take them as they come whilst others prefer to define who will contribute what, when and how.

It is also important to note that you may require 2-3 sprints to understand what a team can and cannot achieve. This ability is often reflect by the burn chart for the prior Sprints.

To learn more about our approach to the other key ceremonies of Scrum, consult the article below.

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