Sprint Planning Meeting

Preparation for a Scrum sprint begins when the Product Owner develops a plan for a product or a project. The Product Owner can be a customer representative or a customer proxy. For product companies, the customer is a market, and the Product Owner serves as a proxy for the market. A Product Owner needs a vision for the product that frames its ultimate purpose, a business plan that shows what revenue streams can be anticipated from the product in which timeframes, and a road map that plans out several releases, with features ordered by contribution to return on investment (ROI). S/he prepares a list of customer requirements prioritized by business value. This list is the product backlog, a single list of features prioritized by value delivered to the customer.

The Scrum begins when enough of the Product Backlog is defined and prioritized to launch the first thirty-day sprint. A Sprint Planning Meeting is used to develop a detailed plan for the iteration. It begins with the Product Owner reviewing the vision, the roadmap, the release plan, and the Product Backlog with the Scrum team. The team reviews the estimates for features on the Product Backlog and confirms that they are as accurate as possible. The team decides how much work it can successfully take into the sprint based on team size, available hours, and level of team productivity. It is important that the team "pull" items from the top of the Product Backlog that they can commit to deliver in a thirty-day sprint. Pull systems have been show to deliver significant productivity gains in lean product development.

When the Scrum team has selected and committed to deliver a set of top priority features from the Product Backlog, the ScrumMaster leads the team in a planning session to break down Product Backlogs features into sprint tasks. These are the specific development activities required to implement a feature and form the Sprint Backlog. This phase of the Sprint Planning Meeting is time-boxed to a maximum of four hours.