Attendees: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Technical Lead, Agile team.
Cadence: Before the start of every iteration.
Recommended time: 2-4 hours for a two-week iteration.
Activity: Identify PBI's stories/tasks/defects to deliver; break stories into tasks, if necessary; provide owners and "hours remaining" estimates for each task; and commit as a team to deliver.
Additional considerations:
Build in pre-planning work where a subset of the team works with the Product Owner to research and develop detailed requirements for items in the next iteration.
Optionally, at the end of iteration planning, ask the team to identify their "line of hope" by taking their lowest likely velocity and listing above it the highest priority items that will fit within that capacity. These PBIs are the "will haves". Additionally, the team might identify their most likely velocity and include above it the next highest priority items that will fit within that capacity. These PBIs are the "might haves". All remaining PBIs on the Ready for Dev backlog are the stretch goals.
Outputs
Iteration goals.
Ready for Dev backlog (the selected stories and the initial list of any tasks needed to deliver the them).
Team agreement that this is the best possible plan, given what is known, and team commitment to say early and loud when things change.
The iteration planning meeting occurs at the beginning of every iteration (sprint or iteration in Scrum or iteration in Kanban in which the team(s) negotiates the selection of items from the relevant backlog, breaks them down into the next unit of delivery, and commits to deliver them within the iteration.
Agenda:
Identify the capacity for the team or release train for this iteration, based on past velocity and upcoming absences or other resource impacts.
Load up the Team backlog or ready to work column on the team Kanban board, highest priority items first.
Get a sense of the team confidence level. Discuss and adjust, as needed.