Synopsis

The team reviews the ordered Release Backlog and selects work items they feel they can deliver in the upcoming Sprint. After selecting the items from the Release Backlog, the team captures the Sprint Goal. Each item selected for the Sprint is then detailed and decomposed into a set of estimated individual tasks. Team members volunteer to own specific tasks. 

Value 

Sprint Planning ensures that the entire team agrees on what will be delivered during the Sprint.

Pre-requisites

The Release Backlog has a preliminary ranking and estimates have been provided for highly ranked work items.

Prepare

The Scrum Master performs the following steps.

1. Create a plan for the Sprint

Create an plan to be populated during the meeting (may be empty or have some preliminary information).

2. Send out invitations

Send out meeting invitations.

Conduct

1. Introduction

The Scrum Master facilitates the meeting.  He/she begins by reviewing the purpose of the Sprint Planning and ground rules.

2. Discuss the the Release Backlog

Discuss the ordered Release Backlog items to bring clarity.

3. Discuss impediments and risks

The team discusses impediments and risks.

4. Agree on Sprint velocity

The Development Team forecasts the number of story points they can accomplish in the upcoming Sprint based on previous experience (Sprint velocity). 

5. Select stories for the Sprint

The team discusses each story proposed for the release, starting with the highest ranked.  The team doesn't review epics, because they are typically too large to fit within a Sprint.

Specifically:

a. Do we agree that this story is correctly ranked?

If the work item is lowered in rank, then discussion of the story is deferred and the next highest ranked story is discussed.

b. Do we agree with the estimate on this story?

c. Is the story sufficiently understood?  Should this story be broken down further and some aspect of it be moved to a later Sprint?
Refactoring the stories, re-estimation and re-ranking may be required.

d. Should this story be included in the Sprint?

Stop allocating stories to the Sprint once the total allocated story points approximates the Sprint velocity. 

6. Agree on the Sprint Goal

A Sprint goal summarizes the desired outcome of the iteration. It provides a shared objective, and it states why it’s worthwhile undertaking the Sprint. Each Sprint should have a shared goal. This ensures that everyone works in the same direction.

7. Break Down Stories Into Tasks

To make it easier to see progress, multiple tasks are created for each story. A task should take approximately one day or less to complete.

8. Estimate tasks

Some teams prefer to assign owners for each task first, so they can estimate according to each owner’s skills. Other teams prefer to estimate all tasks together as a team. Regardless of what approach your team prefers, it is important to give each task an estimate, so that you can follow up on how much work has been completed and how much is remaining for the Sprint.

9. Development team members self-assign tasks

Each development team member looks at the set of unassigned stories and tasks on the Sprint plan and assigns tasks to themselves.

Self-assignment of tasks is central to self-organizing teams in Scrum. Some organizations might decide though to let the Scrum Master assign the work to the team.

10. Review team allocation

11. Review the Sprint load

When all tasks for all stories (assigned to the Sprint) have an estimate and the allocations of the team members are accurate, the Scrum Master reviews the Sprint load.

Total hours estimated for all tasks in the Sprint should be less than the total hours available.  Otherwise the team is overloaded.

For each team member, the total hours available should also be less than the total hours estimated for the work assigned to that team member.

12. Ongoing during the Sprint Planning

New ideas are captured as stories/epics.
An initial ranking is discussed as ideas are captured - highly ranked ideas can be immediately refined and added to the Sprint or Release Backlog, otherwise ideas are captured at a high level and left in the Product Backlog to be refined at a later time.

Impediments and risks are logged.

Follow-up

The Scrum Master performs the following housekeeping steps.

1. Standard meeting follow-up items

This includes creating work items from meeting notes, soliciting feedback from absent members, and resolving any work item(s) associated with the meeting.

2. Baseline the Sprint plan.

A snapshot captures the current state of a plan.  You can use the snapshot later to compare with the future states of the plan to identify trends.