💎 Agile Processes/Practices Often Done Wrong. Part 2D: Sprint Planning — Becoming long and ineffective, mostly useless meetings — Practical Solutions

I share my view of 'Agile Processes/Practices Often Done Wrong' in this series: Part 1:Introduction Part 2:Sprint Planning Becoming long and ineffective, mostly useless meetings⭐ A Significant Percentage of Planned User Stories Are Either Incorrect or Unnecessary How Come?⭐ Practical Solutions💎 … The essential purpose of sprint planning is to decide what, in a form of 'User Story', the team is going to implement. If there is no clear end point, then the very purpose of planning becomes questionable. You may have heard thatover-planningandimplementing unwanted featuresare two major sources of waste in software development. The solution is not more planning—or more meetings. Instead, get customers to test and use the application as early as possible, while it is still under development. Early feedback can prevent teams from spending significant time building features that customers don't need or want, or in wrong way. The term 'User Story' implies end-user involvement. Naturally, end users should be able to verify that it works as intended. That is why there is a term 'Done, Done' associated with user stories. Even if there is still a strong desire to hold a planning session purely for the sake of formality, keep it limited to a handful of people. There is little value in having all developers and testers sit through a planning exercise without a clear, verifiable outcome. This is common sense—and it is difficult to even imagine many other industries operating this way. The following advice is for teams that still want to have sprint planning sessions but want to make them less wasteful.