PD

Sprint planning

Module
The Launch
Skill
[Time/Project Management Teamwork]
Minutes
60

Learning Objectives

  • Planning what will be worked on in the coming as a team

Preparation

Ensure the team has created user stories

Introduction

Agile software teams often work in ‘sprints’ - specific chunks of time where we commit to a development goal, like “Goal: Get the homepage working”. We try to set a single goal and focus on reaching it together as a team.

This helps ensure we’re working on the most important thing (we’ll have lots of ideas for different things we can build, and we don’t want to get distracted). And it should encourage us to work together as a team.

For this project, we’ll be doing 1 week sprints. So, we should plan and start a new sprint at the start of each week. 

Sprint planning is the process of planning our week, specifically focused on our development backlog and picking which user stories to include.

Exercises

Plan the sprint (45 minutes)

Goal: We have a 1 sprint of work planned in our project board

  1. As a group, review the Backlog of user stories on your Project Board
  2. Discuss the user stories - make sure they all have a detailed description of what you need to build and check that everyone in the team understands them. You can check this by asking everyone - would you feel comfortable implementing this yourself? (if no, check why not and add more information) 
  3. Arrange the user stories in priority order - put the most important ones first. These stories should help us reach our MVP and solve customer problems faster.
  4. Start moving the user stories from your Backlog column to the Prioritised column. Keep going until you have enough for a week of work - this is your ‘sprint’. Estimating how much you can do in a week might be tricky. Tip: not enough is better than too much. We can always add more later.
  5. Describe your week of work as a goal in a single sentence. Keep it focused on your product, not the technology. For example, “Goal: Get the homepage working” is better than “Goal: Setup the SQL database.” 
  6. Post your goal to the class Slack channel, e.g. “This week’s sprint goal for the Amazing Coderz team is: Get the homepage working!”