Sprint Planning Meetings in Scrum

Each sprint begins with a sprint planning meeting. For a one month or four-week sprint this meeting should last eight hours. For a two-week sprint, plan for about four hours. As a general rule of thumb, multiply the number of weeks in your sprint by two hours to get your total sprint planning meeting length.

Sprint Planning: Part One

Sprint planning is typically broken into two parts. Part one of sprint planning is a review of the product backlog items the product owner will ask the team to forecast and deliver. This is the time for the product owner to describe what they want to see built for the next sprint. During this part of the meeting, it is not uncommon for the team to engage in conversation with the product owner, asking clarifying questions and driving away ambiguity.

By the end of sprint planning part one, the team will select a sprint goal: a one-sentence description of the overall outcome of the sprint. This helps later when questions about depth and breadth come up: If the work does not directly tie to the sprint goal, then it is not done during the sprint.

Sprint Planning: Part Two

During part two of sprint planning, the team decides how the product backlog items will be built. The team begins by decomposing the product backlog items into work tasks and estimating these in hours. The product owner must be available during this part of the meeting and should be present.

The outputs of sprint planning will be the sprint backlog and a finalized sprint goal.