A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes? By Stefan Wolpers.
Some of you may be aware that checklists originate from an aviation accident. A new plane with a crew of most experienced test-pilots crashed during take-off. It turned out that the plane had no mechanical problems at all, the flight crew just forgot a simple step during the take-off procedure.
This Sprint Planning checklist is modeled after a former Scrum Team of a large multi-national, traditional utility company at the beginning of its Scrum journey. In other words, you will not be able to apply this checklist to your Scrum Team without inspection and adaptation.
The article then deals with:
- Preparing the Sprint Planning
- Address the number of open tickets
- Ask the team members to update the Sprint boards
- Run the Sprint Review
- Run the Sprint Retrospective
- Remind all team members of tomorrow’s Sprint Planning
- Planning
- Cleaning up the old board(s) with the whole Scrum Team by walking the board and checking each ticket’s status
- Discuss the possible spill-over
- Close the previous Sprint
- Ask the Product Owner to share the business objective
- …
- After the Sprint Planning
- Sync the offline board with the online board
- Start collecting data for the upcoming Sprint Retrospective
- Participate in the outstanding Sprint survey
- …
Scrum event checklists can serve both the junior practitioner—what do I have to do—and the experienced agile practitioner to deal with the complexity at hand. Checklists like this example of a Sprint Planning checklist are by no means a violation of the agile mindset but lessen the cognitive load of running events and practices, thus avoiding unnecessary issues with the rest of the organization. Good read!
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