'Happy' Sprint Planning Release Meeting

Hola! Back to duties.. :)

Today I would like to speak about the Sprint Planning Meeting. According to the Scrum definition, this is the one where the team takes a real commitment on what to deliver, how to tackle it within a sprint, etc, etc. Everybody knows about it.

I would like to focus in the second part. The time where the team itself takes all the possible factors into consideration and where all of us are "planning". First of all, what are we planning? The sprint? Tasks breakdown? Just on the user stories?  What about the release? Aren't we delivering value at the end of the sprint?

Sometimes teams tend to think on new-user-stories-sprint fashion and take into a second priority order the real meaning of delivering features. Provide value to the customer. Increase the value of our product and make it real. The release.

I have a theory which is basically that perhaps due to the naming of the meeting possibly makes our mindset to forget on what happened in the previous sprint. Reset. Take a breathe and look ahead. This is what it said. This is maybe because we have been told in Scrum: "Hey, focus on the sprint, no interjections, and deliver stories.". If I read that a meeting is called "Stand-up", I will immediately know what is about. Why we don't do the same with the Sprint Planning?

I have also heard few times when a sprint is about to start: "Which stories are we going to get Mr. Product Owner?". Truth is out there. Few times, in order to mitigate the lack of consideration to the release, product owners - who knows a bit about receiving the value - like to get that written as a sized user story. I don't think it is enough.

I think to a better understanding of the Scrum method, modifying the name of the meeting to a "Sprint/Release" planning meeting will unavoidably make the team to have a clear vision of what is important or what are we effectively doing. Working in sprints and deliver features in order to release cool stuff :)

And according to my latest post, if we are going to rename it, let's call it:

'Happy' Sprint Planning Release Meeting


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