The “other” meeting in Agile/Scrum. The Sprint Planning. You already have your “daily standups” or scrums going, but you need to actually *plan* your sprints. Before you start doing agile, you need to have an initial sprint planning. Call this pre-agile process sprint Sprint Zero or Sprint 0, or whatever, but it is going to be different than the sprint plannings after it. Why? Well, first let’s look into the planning pieces.
Now, you can split parts of these up into different meetings, but I like to keep them all together.
1. Retrospective – 15-20 minutes where you go around the room and ask each person. What went good this sprint, what went bad? Places to improve, places to keep things as is, what did you learn, etc, etc.
2. Review/Demo – 1 hour to 2 hours of going through all the stories you have completed in the previous sprint, reviewing with the “business” or the rest of the team, or product owner, etc. People can ask questions, and just getting all eyes on things helps to maybe find something subtle that someone else might have missed, etc.
3. Planning – This is the meat and potatoes section of your Spring Planning Meeting. Here is where you score all your stories that you have to score for the next sprint, or stories that are unscored in the backlog. This section of the meeting could last 2, 3, 4-6 hours depending on how many stories you have
So why would Sprint Zero be different? Well because you are just starting agile, you don’t have a Retrospective or a Review, you just do planning. (A more in depth post on just the “Planning” section is forthcoming)
Once you have scored all your stories, you are ready to go. After you go through your sprint, and you are nearing the end, you want to have another Sprint Planning Meeting, to plan out the next sprint. You do this type of “sprint”-ly iteration.. well, forever, or as long as your project is going to last.
I have found that holding sprint planning meetings starting early in the morning are better than the afternoon, just because people are more alert.
Also, having a good remote viewing option, such as Goto Meeting is going to make any remote do’ers happy.
Having some food and snacks for the team always is good too. A larger room where it isn’t as cramped is going to be good. Stuffing everyone into a smaller room for 6+ hours could lead to some crabbines, as well as just sweatiness 🙂
Of course, the Scrum Master is going to facilitate the meeting, but you might have one person or multiple do’ers drive the review/demo.
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