SPRINT PLANNING MEETING

SPRINT PLANNING MEETING

During the first part of sprint planning, Sprint goal is defined.

Sprint Goal

It’s a short, 1-2 sentence, description of what the team plans to achieve during the sprint. It is written collaboratively by the team and the product owner.

  1. At the beginning of every sprint, the product owner and scrum team hold a sprint planning meeting to negotiate which Product backlog items they want to convert into a working product during the sprint.
  2. The product owner is responsible to select items which are most important to the business.
  3. The development team is responsible for selecting the amount of work they think they can implement without accruing technical debt.
  4. By the end of the sprint planning meeting, we should answer two questions
    1. What will be delivered in the increment?
    2. How will the work be achieved?
  5. Sprint planning meeting is timeboxed to 4 hours for a 2 weeks sprint.

Velocity Driven  

 https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/velocity-driven-sprint-planning

Velocity driven sprint planning is based on the premise that the amount of work a team will do in a coming sprint will be roughly equal to what they have done in the past. Provided the team is the same size and availability remains constant.

This approach is best utilized when the team’s velocity is stabilized and the composition of the team is consistent.

Steps:

  1. Select the team’s average velocity
  2. Select Product Backlog Items
  3. Identify tasks (optional)
  4. Estimate the tasks (optional)

Types of Velocity:

  1. Initial Velocity: Calculated generally for the first sprint based on capacity, usually, 1/3 of the planned velocity.
  2. Average Velocity: Velocity calculated based on the past few sprints.
  3. Optimal / Ideal: Maximum velocity the team has achieved in the past and they would want to keep achieving.

For example: In first 6 sprints, the max velocity of the team is 35. The optimal velocity would be 35. But let’s say in the 7th sprint the team achieve 40, then optimal velocity will be 40.

    4. Planned Velocity: This velocity is calculated based on focus factor

Focus Factor: It’s a mathematical formula that helps to identify a possible number of deliverables.

FF = velocity / capacity
Capacity = no. of team members * available hours

Forecast = Focus Factor * updated capacity

Example: if one of the developers won’t be available for the sprint how will you calculate velocity?

Let’s say 6 developers * 10 days * 8 hours
Capacity = 480 ideal hours
Assume velocity = 48 story points
Focus Factory = 48 / 480 = 0.1

———————————————————————————

Forecast = Focus Factor * updated capacity
0.1*400 = 40 story points.

Factors affecting Velocity

  1. Impediment
  2. Clarity about the product
  3. Team maturity
  4. Healthy development environment
  5. Project Transparency

Capacity Driven (task-hours-commitment)

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/commitment-driven-planning

Best utilized when the team is new. New as in either component of the team is new, either team is new to agile or the team is implementing completely new kind of project unlike any of their previous projects.

  1. We first calculate the total number of ideal work hours available in the team.
  2. Then the top priority user story is taken and broken down into tasks
  3. Each task is estimated into hours
  4. If any capacity is left, the next high-priority user story is taken and the process continues until there is no more capacity left