At the beginning of the sprint cycle , a “Sprint planning meeting” is held.
- Creating a objective to the Sprint – The Sprint Goal
- Create a Sprint Backlog by selecting what work is to be done
There are 3 TOPICS in the Sprint Planning Event
- TOPIC 1 – WHY – Entire Scrum Team discusses on the objective for the Sprint
- TOPIC 2 – WHAT – Entire team selects the part of the Product Backlog which should go as part of this Sprint. This may be based on the past performance of the team.
- TOPIC 3 – HOW – Details of the plan on how things need to be done is decided in the third topic. This is primarily done by the Developers.
Product Owner and Sprint Planning Meeting
In Scrum, the sprint planning meeting is attended by the entire Scrum team. Outside stakeholders may be invited based on the need. Outsiders may include SMEs on business side or technical side.
During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner describes the highest priority features to the team which may help achieve the business objective. The team clears the doubts that they have and creates the plan for the Sprint.
Product Owner should ensure that enough discussions are done on Product Backlog items even before coming to the Sprint Planning event. Generally, the Sprint Planning should be used for clarifying enough details so that the plan for the Sprint can be prepared quickly.
The Product Owner’s is accountable for coming up with a business objective based on which a sprint goal is crafted by the Scrum Team. Sprint Goal is a short, one- or two-sentence, description of what the team plans to achieve during the sprint. It is written collaboratively by the team and the product owner. Sprint Goal gives a little bit of flexibility to the Scrum Team to do the work.
The following are example sprint goals on an eCommerce application:
- Integration of 2-3 payment engines in the e-Commerce site
- Develop a shopping cart to checkout and ship items
- Develop a login functionality for e-Commerce site
Click Here to Watch our video on Inputs to Sprint Planning