Scrum Sprint Kickoff : How will the chosen work get done?
For us, this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of planning. If the DEV team has the proper insight and knowledge to get a high level of transparency into the backlog the sprint kickoff is a bit more simplified.
In this part of the kickoff, each of the stories are investigated and broken down into functional blocks. This is also where the design and architecture for the next iteration is discussed. Where the first part of the meeting is focussed on clarity regarding the stories and the business case, this time block is dedicated to gaining technical insight.
Cross-functionality is crucial in this process. Everyone needed to successfully complete the iteration and deliver a functional increment, should be included in this meeting and preferably in the team. We sometimes include consultants in these sessions to ensure that we can gain maximum insight into the problem. We aim to minimise naive technical debt.
The following tasks are performed during this part of the meeting:
- The ‘HOW’ question is asked for each story and the acceptance criteria is reviewed.
- Each story is weighted according to the amount of work as well as the complexity of the work. I will discuss the way we do weighting in more detail in another post.
- The stories are dragged into a backlog representing the stories to be completed during the sprint.
- The velocity trend and team capacity calculation is used as a metric to determine how many points will potentially be burned during the next sprint.
- The goal set by the PO is re-negotiated if needed.
