Sprint Planning is a Scrum event that usually occurs at the beginning of a sprint to lay out the work to be performed for that Sprint. It is timeboxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter.
So, who is going to join this meeting?
The whole Scrum team should join (Developers, Product Owner, and Scrum Master)
Stakeholders may also be invited to provide more perspectives
Input & Outputs of a Sprint Planning
Inputs
Before starting this meeting, the Scrum team (especially the PO) has to prepare good product backlog (it should be DEEP). You may have heard of ‘Backlog Grooming’ or ‘Backlog Refinement’. It is an optional practice (not meeting) in Scrum, because some backlogs don’t need it. However, for most teams, it’s better to get the team together to review and refine the backlog prior to sprint planning.
Outputs
Sprint Planning addresses the following topics:
Sprint goal: Based on the business objectives & product roadmap, the whole Scrum team collaborates to define a Sprint Goal before the end of the meeting.
Sprint backlog: Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint, which is called Sprint backlog. It’s worth noting that the sprint backlog doesn’t need to be complete at first and may be refined as more is learnt. So how many tickets to pick in a sprint? This topic will be discuss in another post about Story points.
The How: For each item, the Developers plan the work necessary and provide an estimation (story points) so we know how long it would take. How this is done is at the sole discretion of the Developers. No one else tells them how to turn Product Backlog items into Increments of value.
