How do you adapt sprint planning to different contexts and team sizes?

1 Know your constraints

Before you start planning, you need to know the boundaries of your sprint. How long is it? How much capacity does your team have? What are the dependencies, risks, or assumptions that might affect your work? These factors will help you prioritize and estimate the user stories or features that you want to deliver in the sprint. You can use tools like velocity, burn-down charts, or story points to track and forecast your team's performance.

3 Use a suitable format

There is no one-size-fits-all way to do sprint planning. You can use different formats, techniques, or tools to suit your context and team size. For example, you can use a physical or digital board to visualize your backlog, sprint goals, and tasks. You can use a timer, a checklist, or an agenda to structure your meeting and keep it focused. You can use a voting, ranking, or grouping method to prioritize and select your user stories or features. You can use a planning poker, a t-shirt sizing, or a relative estimation technique to estimate your effort and complexity.

5 Align and commit

Sprint planning is not only about defining what to do, but also why and how to do it. You need to align and commit to your sprint plan as a team. You need to agree on the sprint goal, the sprint backlog, and the definition of done. You need to clarify the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of each team member. You need to confirm the acceptance criteria, the testing strategy, and the delivery method for each user story or feature. You need to ensure that everyone is on the same page and committed to delivering value to the customer.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?