{"id":641,"date":"2011-08-06T10:03:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-06T10:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikekuphal.azurewebsites.net\/?p=641"},"modified":"2011-08-06T10:03:30","modified_gmt":"2011-08-06T10:03:30","slug":"agile-planning-planning-session-timing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/?p=641","title":{"rendered":"Agile Planning: Planning Session Timing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once your team has decided to go forward with Group planning and estimating<\/a> (and may have even decided to try Planning Poker as a estimation technique<\/a>), often the next question is: \u201cHow much time should I expect a planning session to take?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Best Practice: Time box 1-2 hours of planning per week in Sprint<\/h4>\n

\"tb\"<\/a>A common rule of thumb quoted all over the internet is to time box sprint planning to 1-2 hours per week in the sprint.\u00a0 So expect 2-4 hours for a two week sprint, 4-8 hours for a four week sprint.\u00a0 In my experience, I have found that this amount of time is more than enough as long as your team has some experience with group planning.\u00a0 If your team is new to group planning (or a majority of your team is new to it), expect to add an additional hour or two just to allow for learning discussions to take their course.\u00a0 Expect 3-5 sprints to allow new team members to really get the hang of sprinting and the planning process that goes with it.<\/p>\n

To some, 2-4 hours of planning time, an additional hour for a Retrospective, and also an hour for Review\/Demo, seems like a lot to allocate for each team member every two weeks (assuming two weeks sprints).\u00a0 In essence, you have a full day of \u2018Meetings\u2019 for the team.\u00a0 My experience has been that the team can feel that this is a lot, but it really does pay off over the two week sprint, by ensuring all team members have a good understanding of all tasks and has participated in ensuring any unique knowledge a specific team member has about a task is shared and included in the estimation process.\u00a0 This also allows for the knowledge sharing necessary to allow team members to pick their tasks off the task board as the sprint progresses<\/a>, allowing for a team \u2018to do\u2019 task board instead of a number of personal \u2018to do\u2019 queues.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Best Practice: Start your Sprints on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday<\/h4>\n

\"Cal\"<\/a>One other important thing to consider: Attempt to start your sprint, and therefore your planning sessions, on a day other than the start or end of the week (Mon\/Fri).\u00a0 There is a natural build up to the end of a sprint, and it\u2019s just not fun to end a sprint on a Friday or Monday given the weekend in between.\u00a0 This also takes into account that often team members will extend their weekend by taking a vacation day on these edge days and might miss a planning meeting more often.\u00a0 Teams I participate on have started sprints on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and have found those days have worked well.<\/p>\n

Next in this series: Bugs\/Defects: How they fit into the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once your team has decided to go forward with Group planning and estimating (and may have even decided to try Planning Poker as a estimation technique), often the next question is: \u201cHow much time should I expect a planning session to take?\u201d   Best Practice: Time box 1-2 hours of planning per week in Sprint … Continue reading “Agile Planning: Planning Session Timing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile","category-scrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikekuphal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}