He who fails to plan, plans to fail. – unknown

In many ways, one of the most dreaded tasks of every iteration is the Sprint Planning Meeting.  This meeting is a very important meeting, but many, many things can go wrong and make this meeting a very long and very painful experience.  However, this meeting is critical to the success of the team.  If the team doesn’t know what they’re doing at the beginning of the iteration, how can they commit to getting the work done?

To hopefully help ease the pain of the Sprint Planning Meeting, here are a few suggestions.

Identify Stories and Priorities Before The Meeting This step is critical and often missed, especially on teams with dysfunctional product owners.  Before the start of sprint planning, product owners and designers should have a good idea of what the story is, the rules around the story, and at least some basic paper prototypes for the story.  Testers...

Join us at our May 2011 Roundtable, where Jonathan Rayback from Motorola will discuss using Scrum in highly constrained scope/schedule/quality environments, and Joe McBride from Veracity will discuss discovering intrinsic motivation based on Drive from Daniel Pink.