Sprint Planning

Timebox: 2 hours for a 2-week sprint. Who: whole team. Owner: Scrum Master facilitates, Product Owner brings the priorities.

Input

• A refined, ordered backlog
• Known team capacity for the sprint (subtract holidays, on-call, support rotation)
• Last sprint's velocity

Agenda

1. Why — Product Owner proposes a sprint goal in one sentence
2. What — team pulls stories from the top of the backlog until capacity is full
3. How — team breaks the top stories into subtasks and confirms nobody is guessing

Output

• A written sprint goal everyone can repeat from memory
• A committed sprint backlog, tagged Sprint N
• Every committed story has story points, an owner, and acceptance criteria

Rules that actually matter

• The team decides how much it takes. Nobody assigns capacity to a team from outside.
• Do not pull a story that fails the Definition of Ready. Send it back to refinement instead.
• Plan to about 80% of capacity. The other 20% absorbs bugs, interruptions, and the thing nobody predicted. Teams that plan to 100% miss every sprint and then blame estimation.

Common failure

Planning turns into refinement. If you are discovering requirements during planning, your refinement session is broken and planning will always overrun.