Summary

You must first understand the reasons behind planning in order to run effective planning sessions. There are meeting mechanics that you as ScrumMaster should follow—game rules of sorts provided by the legacy Scrum literature—and yet even more importantly, you should strive to create and sustain a certain spirit in your meetings. Planning meeting are not crystal balls into which you or the team can look into and predict the future of a project; rather they are the reserved space and time in which a team envisions the possibilities, gets excited about the outcomes, and establishes urgency by acknowledging that only so much can be done in one small time box. Sprint plans are the result of detailed discussions between team members as they figure out how they'll deliver quality results by the end of the sprint. In Chapter 4, Sprint! Visible, Collaborative, and Meaningful Work, we will explore how a good plan supports a team as they work together during their sprint, and how plans change...