How to do Sprint Planning with ONES.com

Published in

Nerd For Tech

7 min readJan 13, 2023

We’ve always heard about the concept of Scrum in project management. In the English definition, Scrum is where a team comes together to move forward. When applied to project management, it means that a team works together to move a product forward. A framework thus is derived and has been developed into a set of rules that guide software teams to approach their projects in a more effective and productive way.

There are no one-size-fits-all rules when it comes to applying the Scrum framework. The best way to apply Scrum is: firstly, understand what’s in Scrum and why it is so popular; second, understand your team and develop the right way to use Scrum; third, find the right tool to apply Scrum. In this article, you are going to learn what Scrum is, how to match your team with the Scrum framework, and last but not least, how to apply Scrum practices in the perfect Scrum tool — ONES.com.

What is Scrum

First, let’s have a look at what is Scrum and why is it so popular.

Scrum is one of the most popular Agile methodologies used by project managers, among Lean, Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal, and Kanban, to develop and deliver products, and continuously ship values to customers.

Scrum is popular because it provides a set of rules and procedures that are easy for teams to work with.

Here’s how Scrum works:

The PO collects requirements from different stakeholders

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Product Backlog is created according to the feedback

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During the sprint planning meeting, plan the prioritized product backlog items into Sprint Backlog

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The Development team starts working to deliver product increments.

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Delivering increments of valuable work in short cycles

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After delivery, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective will be held, which marks the end of the current sprint.

Key elements of the Scrum framework

In the Scrum framework, there are a few key elements:

Three roles that take part in
Three Artifacts and Five events
and practice the Five values

Three roles

A Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and a Development Team

Product Owner

Product Owner is the one who makes sure that the team is creating the most valuable product they can create. They are responsible for:

Identifying requirements
Prioritizing backlog items
Defining acceptance criteria
Deciding product release content and date

Scrum Master

Scrum Masters use their knowledge of Scrum to help the team work as effectively as they can be. They need to:

Facilitate teamwork
Coach teams on the Scrum process and values
Clear obstacles to productivity for the team
Give the team the proper guidance

Development Team

The third role is the development team. Accountable for delivery, they are

cross-functional, including Dev, QA, Business analyst, and other necessary roles for development
they are self-organizing, they don’t rely on others to make decisions
they are small sized, usually there are five to nine members in a development team

Three artifacts

Product Backlog — a list of what is needed to improve the product

Maintained by Product Owner, who’s responsible for adding, deleting and prioritizing items
User story is one of the best practices
Each requirement should specify its values

Sprint Backlog — a list of work in the developer’s plan for the sprint after discussion, analysis and calculation

Pulled from the Product Backlog during the sprint planning session
The team defines the definition of done (DoD)

Increment — the sum of all Product backlog items completed during a sprint, additive to all prior Increments and thoroughly verified. An increment must be:

Workable. In order to prove value, the increment must be usable for customers
Verified. A demo will take place to showcase the latest stable version of a product
Must meet the criteria of the DoD

Five events

Next, let’s have a look at the five events. The first one is

Sprint

It contains all of the other Scrum events
with a cycle of 2–4 weeks
No extension will happen
And it’s time-boxed

Sprint planning — an event dedicated to planning out the work and goal during the sprint

During the meeting, participants should:

Identify the sprint goal and what backlog items will contribute to that goal
Clarify requirements that are not clear
The inputs in this meeting will be the product backlog
and the outputs will be the sprint backlog

Daily Scrum — a standup meeting for updating progress toward the sprint goal and increasing transparency

In the meeting, team members answer the following questions:

What I’ve done yesterday
What’s the plan today
Any impediments? Whether it affects the progress?

It should be noticed that the meeting:

is kept within 15 mins (time-boxed)
has no in-depth discussion
takes place same time and place every working day

Sprint Review — an event held at the end of the sprint to review what was accomplished

All team members and stakeholders attend
2–4 hours
Product owners don’t have to accept the delivery

Sprint Retrospective — the Scrum Team gets together to talk about how the Sprint went and identify helpful changes to improve their effectiveness

Held after the sprint review
2–4 hours
The whole team attends

Five values

Openness — information flows across the team to boost work efficiency. Scrum encourages information sharing so that all team members have the right information to work more efficiently.

Courage — the scrum team should have the courage to make a commitment and achieve it

Respect — respect each and every team member regardless of their background and project experience

Focus — focus the heart and energy to accomplish the work,

Commitment — the scrum team is motivated by the commitment, not just the plan, to finish the project

To sum up, Scrum is a framework that helps teams deliver the most valuable product in the shortest time scope. Teams can adopt the methodology according to their reality, and choose the methods that fit the team best.

How to align your team with the Scrum framework

Teams do not have to follow what’s in the Scrum framework in reality, due to the differences in team size, project scope, resources, and budget. When adopting Scrum, the following points should be carefully considered:

Team size. Depending on the team size, you can choose the roles necessary for your project.
Available resources. The resource here refers to the budget, human resources, and other input that’s essential for the development.
Project scope. This factor helps decide the duration of your sprints, the time of delivery, and team velocity.

Taking these factors into account, there’s no doubt that teams need the right tool to work things out. And ONES.com, a tool designed based on Scrum methodology, is definitely the best choice.

Sprint planning with ONES.com

We’ve introduced the key elements of adopting Scrum. The next thing is how to implement it in practice. In the following session, we’ll have a look at how to do sprint planning with ONES.com.

Assuming that we are in a sprint planning meeting, the team should first identify:

Sprint goal. For example, make more money, complete the top three priorities, develop a system good enough to be released or add a basic backstage system support)
Sprint cycle (when you’re creating a sprint in ONES.com). This helps make sure that the team works at a steady pace and that the time estimates are more accurate

The team can specify the two things when creating a sprint in ONES.com. Let’s go to the Sprint component in ONES.com, and click “Create sprint” on your left-hand side. You can fill in information like sprint name, sprint goal, and the sprint cycle, like one to four weeks. If it is too short, the time left for development may not be enough. If it’s too long, it will be no different from a waterfall project. So the suggestion is to keep it within two weeks. You can also create other fields in the form. Go to More>Settings>Sprint configuration, Create a new sprint field, and customize the field based on the name, type, and value. Set the field as “Required” if it’s necessary to fill in for the team.

Team velocity. This can be decided through the number of items, time spent in total, and story points.

When you have a clear idea of team velocity, you can estimate the number of product backlog items to be planned into the next sprint. In this step, the vague requirements should be clarified and the definition of done should be decided.

If you’re using ONES Project to do this, go to Unplanned issues under Sprint, filter the issues according to priority, then what we’ve got is a product backlog list. PO can go through each requirement for the team, and clarify the definition, values, DoD, etc. Then team members can estimate the story points and worklog. Select the issues and on the top bar, it shows how many are the estimated hours, the hours left, and the total story points. Select enough issues to match the team velocity, and they are ready to be planned into sprints.

After the planning, it’s time to:

Split requirements into tasks
Assign tasks to team members
Estimate time spent

First, go to a requirement in the sprint to split them into sub-tasks. Assign them to different assignees. The Scrum board can also be used to do the split work. Click the “+” to add sub-tasks under each requirement. Input estimated working hours. Go back to the board, and you can visualize sprint progress in the Burndown chart.

This is the end of a sprint planning meeting. The scrum master will keep the meeting on track. To unlock more functions and how it practices the Scrum framework, try ONES.com for free!

Originally published at https://blog.ones.com on January 13, 2023.