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Sprint Planning Process

Here is how an agile team plans a new sprint, as part of an existing release plan:

  1. Hold a retrospective meeting to discuss the previous sprints and lessons learned. (This template need to create)
  2. Run a sprint planning meeting to analyze the release plan and update it according to velocity in recent sprints, changes to priorities, new features, or idle time that wasn’t planned for in the release.
  3. Make sure user stories are detailed enough to work on. Elaborate on tasks that are not well defined, to avoid surprises.
  4. Break down user stories into specific tasks. For example, the user story “view tasks assigned to me” can be broken up into UX design of a “my tasks screen”, back-end implementation, and front-end development of the interface. Keep the size of tasks small, no more than one workday.
  5. Assign tasks to team members and confirm that they are committed to performing them. In the agile/scrum framework this is done by the Scrum Master.
  6. Write the tasks on (physical) sticky cards and hang them up on a large board visible to the entire team. All the user stories in the current sprint should be up on the board.
  7. Track the progress of all the tasks on a grid, by recording who is responsible for completing each task, the estimated time to complete it, remaining hours, and actual hours used. This time tracking should be updated by all team members and visible to everyone.
  8. Track velocity using a burndown chart. During the sprint, use the team’s time tracking to calculate a chart showing the number of tasks or hours remaining, vs. the plan. The slope of the burndown chart shows if we are on schedule, ahead, or behind schedule.