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Overview
Overview
Backlog Review and Sprint Planning both help a team understand their own workload and are important elements of many successful Agile teams. Whilst they are similar, Sprint Planning focuses on the next cycle of work and is where teams commit to an amount of tickets whereas Backlog Review focuses on the longer term and is for teams to understand the upcoming work and priorities.
Introduction
Introduction
The key to having both these meetings succeed is great facilitation, so we have some top tips further down the page for you to follow. To use our cake-baking analogy from the What is Agile? page again, Backlog Review is where you’d make sure you have all your ingredients in the correct amounts, the tools you need to bake your cakes and everyone in the team understands what needs to be done - whereas Sprint Planning would be you deciding how many cakes you could bake in your cycle.
Backlog Review
Backlog Review
This goes by a lot of different names but the outcome is the same - a shared understanding of the workload coming up, ensuring tickets are ready for planning and often insight for the Product Owner (PO) into the likely effort so they can reprioritise accordingly.
Some teams don’t have this meeting, instead relying on the PO to organise things and challenging any unknowns during planning itself. Others have this meeting but just have one or two representatives from the team attend with the PO rather than the whole team. We’d recommend that if you choose to have this meeting, at least initially, the entire team should attend to get a sense of the meeting and what their purpose there is.
As you can see, there are a lot of variations so we’ll explain the basics of the most common way our teams at Holiday Extras do their backlog reviews! We have a separate page which gives a guide on how to establish a healthy backlog.
- Get the whole team on a call or in a room.
- Look at the backlog in the priority order the product lead has put the tickets in to understand where the focus is going to be for the team.
- Check all tickets that are deemed “ready” have the appropriate information on them needed for any engineer to pick them up.
- This includes stakeholder definitions of done, contacts to speak to, any attachments or other information to ensure the work won’t get blocked.
- Ensure engineers and testers are in agreement on the approach needed on this ticket.
- Ensure the PO has a good indication of what’s realistic to pick up in the next sprint/cycle so they have time to reprioritise or talk to stakeholders to get clarity based on the information given.
Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning
A meeting which traditionally only happens in Scrum, this is the time when teams go through the backlog and commit to an amount of work they can complete in the next cycle. If the tickets have all the information required on them and have been properly understood by the team, this should be a case of adding estimates (if you’ve not already done this in Backlog Review) and pulling in the tickets they believe they can achieve.
Many teams will also have a Mid-Sprint Review where they check they’re on track to deliver as promised and if they’ve over-committed they can pull work out - and similarly if they’ve under-committed they can pull more in!
You will first have to establish a healthy backlog. The rough plan of this meeting is as follows:
- Get the whole team on a call or in a room
- Look at the backlog in the priority order the product lead has put the tickets in
- Talk through the first ticket and add estimates to give an indication of effort (we have a great retro on why estimation is great)
- Move on to the next ticket and repeat
- Pull in the work, name your goal and your sprint and off you go!
If this isn’t your first sprint, you’ll have an idea of your velocity (the amount of tasks and therefore points you can achieve) so your team can commit to a similar amount of work - or more as you get better! If this is one of your first sprints, it’s going to be a bit of a guessing game until you get into a flow, so just take a punt and review at Retro how you got on and either increase or decrease your points.
As you become a more advanced team, you may find you don’t need to estimate at all, but we’d certainly recommend it for new teams.
Top Tips for Facilitation
Top Tips for Facilitation
- Listen actively
- Ask questions
- Encourage team to break down tasks
- Question if the ticket meets the definition of done/ready
- Encourage participation from everyone in the meeting
Summary
Summary
Whilst both these meetings are traditionally only a requirement in Scrum, a lot of teams doing Kanban or a mix of the two methodologies will also choose to have these meetings to help when first starting working in an Agile way. This ensures everyone is aligned in the goal and will achieve all they can.
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