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Rules of Scrum Ceremonies — Sprint Planning Meeting

Table of Contents hide
1 Participants and Roles
2 Sprint Planning Meeting — Part I
3 Sprint Planning Meeting — Part II
4 More Scrum Events Articles

The sprint planning meeting is held before the sprint begins. The purpose of this meeting is to define the sprint plan and set sprint goals. The sprint plan includes agreeing on the number of backlog items in the sprint that will be the responsibility of the development team, as well as determining the goals for the current sprint and sprint backlog.

The Sprint planning meeting is time-boxed to 8 hours and consists of two segments that are time-boxed to 4 hours each.

  • Part I: Selecting Product Backlog;
  • Part II: Preparing a Sprint Backlog.

Participants and Roles

  • The attendees are the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the Team. Additional parties can be invited by any of these people to provide additional business domain or technology domain information and advice, but they are dismissed after this information is provided.
    There are no chickens as observers.
  • The Product Owner must prepare the Product Backlog prior to the meeting. In the absence of either the Product Owner or the Product Backlog, the Scrum Master is required to construct an adequate Product Backlog prior to the meeting and to stand in for the Product Owner.

Sprint Planning Meeting — Part I

  • The goal of the first segment, or first 4 hours, is for the Team to select those Product Backlog items that it believes it can commit to turning into an increment of potentially shippable product functionality.
  • The Team will demonstrate this functionality to the Product Owner and stakeholders at the Sprint review meeting at the end of the Sprint.
  • The Team can make suggestions, but the decision of what Product Backlog can constitute the Sprint is the responsibility of the Product Owner.
  • The Team is responsible for determining how much of the Product Backlog that the Product Owner wants worked on the Team will attempt to do during the Sprint.
  • Time-boxing the first segment to 4 hours means that this is all of the time that is available for analyzing the Product Backlog. Further analysis must be performed during the Sprint. Large-grained, high-priority Product Backlog with imprecise estimates might not be thoroughly understood during this part of the Sprint planning meeting and might result in the Team not being able to complete all of the Product Backlog that it selects.

Sprint Planning Meeting — Part II

  • The second segment of the Sprint Planning meeting occurs immediately after the first segment and is also time-boxed to 4 hours.
  • The Product Owner must be available to the Team during the second segment to answer questions that the Team might have about the Product Backlog.
  • It is up to the Team, acting solely on its own and without any direction from outside the Team, to figure out during the second segment how it will turn the selected Product Backlog into an increment of potentially shippable product functionality. No one else is allowed to do anything but observe or answer questions seeking further information.
  • The output of the second segment of the Sprint planning meeting is a list, called the Sprint Backlog, of tasks, task estimates, and assignments that will start the Team on the work of developing the functionality.

The task list might not be complete, but it must be complete enough to reflect mutual commitment on the part of all Team members and to carry them through the first part of the Sprint, while the Team devises more tasks in the Sprint Backlog.

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