Commitment-Based Planning: 5 steps to save your Sprint

Sprint planning is an important aspect of agile projects, and this can be done in just 5 steps.

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Planning a sprint is critical in Agile projects, but tailoring delivery to the product owner’s desires and the ability of the development team is always a challenge. Studies confirm that the sprint planning phase is critical to ensure project success, but it is also a difficult problem because several factors impact on the optimality of a sprint plan.[1] For this, it is necessary that the items of the product backlog be detailed for a better understanding and an adequate estimate of the execution of the tasks, based on a compromise between the product owner and agile team.

Ilan Goldstein, Agile trainer, establish 5 steps when planning the sprint, called by him as commitment-based planning[2], to determine the number of specific tasks to include in the sprint backlog. See below :

1. Start with the highest-priority Product Backlog Item.
2. Deconstruct the Product Backlog Item into tasks with estimates in hours.
3. Identify any specific task dependencies.
4. Continue this cycle until the team’s collective capacity is full.
5. If the sprint duration doesn’t…