Coach’s Corner

How can you make your sprint planning event more effective? A lot of Scrum masters make the mistake of spending the whole sprint planning meeting with their heads buried in a digital tool like Jira or VersionOne. You’re just trying to help, right? Actually, you’d be much better off turning your computer off and turning your full focus to the meeting at hand. It’s painful to sit in front of a TV or projector watching a team try to plan using a digital tool.

Here’s a great way to facilitate your sprint planning sessions without using a digital tool:

• Always consider the inputs to a sprint planning event: the product backlog, velocity, capacity, retrospective commitments, the definition of “done”, and the previous increment.

• Print or write the “ready” portion of your product backlog on a single color of wide sticky notes—one product backlog item per sticky note. This is the “what” for you to consider.

• Bring a blank piece of paper and write “Sprint Goal’’ on it.

• Bring smaller, different colored sticky notes intended for the “how.” These are the activities that need to take place in order for the work to be accomplished.

• Encourage the team to break the PBI down into a list of activities they need to accomplish to complete it; if they have any additional questions about the “what,” they can ask the product owner for clarification.

• Create an imaginary line (or use a ruler) that separates the sprint backlog from the product backlog. As the development team puts an item into the sprint backlog, move the line down.

• Whenever someone moves a new item into the sprint backlog, ask, “Has a sprint goal emerged?” and “How full do we feel?” Incorporate the answers to those questions into the Sprint Goal paper and by moving the needle on the fuel gauge to the appropriate spot, as shown here. If answers haven’t yet emerged, continue this process.

In this chapter, we looked at sprint planning and the pains that can come with it. Next we’ll take a deep dive into an output of sprint planning: the sprint backlog. Hopefully, now that you’re armed with better sprint planning techniques, your sprint backlog will reflect that. Keep reading to explore how you can continue the momentum of a good sprint planning event.