Best Practice

Here are some best practices that you may use as a product owner, Scrum master, or team member to increase your productivity and put your group on the road to success. These practices are researched and chosen based on their importance in the Sprint Planning process.

• Bring a well-prepared product backlog - The product owner's increment of the product backlog is one of the first sprint planning recommendations. Before the meeting, it should be completed. By doing this, you can effectively plan the following Sprint and save time. The Product Owner must give higher priority to User Stories in the Product Backlog for which the acceptance criteria have been revised and written.

• Set specific goals and objectives - To determine the objectives that the team will pursue during each sprint, the team and customers must align their goals. The Product Owner, working with the team, will decide which tasks need to be finished during the sprint based on the goals.

• Check your roadmap before the Sprint planning - Reviewing your project's roadmap in the first two weeks of the new year is a good idea. Epics and versions, which serve as the framework for agile program planning and aid in keeping track of the completion of longer-term work, are two crucial agile concepts that the roadmap provides context for. Before your sprint planning meeting, check that the roadmap is current, available to the entire team, and that the epics and versions are listed correctly in Jira.

• Use Planning Poker for Task Estimation - A tried-and-true, simple method for planning and estimating is called planning poker. Accurate and implementable estimates can be made using this straightforward technique.

• Timing - The Sprint Planning meeting needs to be scheduled thoughtfully. The Scrum Framework specifies that a meeting should last no longer than eight hours during a Sprint. Whether you use a structured or unstructured meeting format, it is absolutely essential to time-box the meeting.

• Maintain a reasonable number of tasks - Your objective when planning your transition from a backlog to a sprint should be to operate as efficiently as you can within the framework. Over-committing to your sprint only works against the goals that the sprint philosophy was intended to achieve. Getting the work organized and in a better deliverable state is a focus of some of the Sprint planning best practices. Assigning the team an excessive amount of work will only increase their workload. Therefore, keeping workloads manageable should always be the top priority.

• Creating sub-tasks - An important component of the Sprint Planning meeting is breaking down the identified tasks into smaller sub-tasks. This is particularly true and relevant when the tasks are too difficult and completing them all can be challenging. Therefore, it is advisable to break the tasks down into smaller sub-tasks. Once more, it is a good idea for each sub-task to take no longer than a day.

• Target velocity - The Scrum Master gathers approval from the entire team before preparing historical data, such as past sprint velocity. With the estimated workload, the velocity data may provide insight into how many stories the team hopes to complete during the Sprint.

• Share your experience with others - Sharing experiences from prior sprints is one of the best practices for sprint planning so that errors can be prevented. If the team is brand-new, consult the sprint burn-down charts to benefit from the team's past experiences.

• Chart velocity - By determining the velocity, the progress of the work can be compared to early estimates and used to more accurately forecast team commitments and outcomes. The sprint planning needs to be reviewed and improved if the velocity is drastically changing.

• Prioritize Process Steps The task definition and task sizing step can be done at the same time. But in order to create the tasks for the sprint backlog, the scrum team must first choose the size of a task.

  1. Task Definition

  2. Task Sizing

  3. Create a sprint backlog