Effective Jira sprint planning ensures your team starts sprints with a clear goal, a realistic workload, and a backlog that’s ready for development. Jira provides the tools to organize and plan your sprints. But the quality of your sprint plan ultimately depends on how well you conduct the planning process itself.
This guide will help you do it correctly. We’ll walk you through how to practically prepare for and run sprint planning meetings in Jira.
We’ll break down everything, covering:
- What sprint planning in Jira is.
- What to do before the sprint planning meeting.
- How to run sprint planning in Jira step-by-step.
- Some Jira sprint planning best practices.
- Common sprint planning mistakes to avoid.
Let’s begin by understanding what sprint planning in Jira is.
What is sprint planning in Jira?
Sprint planning is a Scrum event in which the Scrum team meets to decide what work will be completed during the sprint and how it will be accomplished. Its purpose is to initiate the sprint by laying out the work to be performed. Sprint planning in Jira is how you carry out this process using Jira’s features.
As a Scrum event, sprint planning is really about answering these three questions:
- Why is this sprint valuable? You define the sprint goal, which spells out the outcome the sprint is intended to achieve.
- What can be done in this sprint? The sprint backlog is what the team commits to completing during the sprint.
- How will the chosen work get done? An understanding of how the team will carry out the work.
You don’t have to answer these in any particular order. But by the end of the meeting, there should be an answer for each.
Who attends this meeting?
The sprint planning meeting brings together:
- The product owner. To present the sprint backlog items, answer questions, and help to agree on a sprint goal.
- Scrum master. To keep the meeting focused and time-boxed.
- Development team. To review the proposed work and determine how much work can realistically be completed during the sprint.
How long this meeting takes depends on sprint length. The standard duration is a 1-hour meeting for a 2-week sprint and a 2-hour meeting for a 4-week sprint.
A fair bit of work needs to be done beforehand to ensure sprint planning meetings run smoothly and don’t take too long.
What to do before the sprint planning meeting
To ensure the team spends time planning, not preparing, here’s what should happen beforehand.
Refine the backlog first
The Product Owner and development team will review upcoming backlog items the day before the sprint planning meeting to ensure they’re ready for consideration by:
- Prioritizing backlog items.
- Reviewing items for clarity and flagging anything ambiguous or missing information.
- Breaking large items (epics) into sprint-sized stories.
- Drafting the acceptance criteria, that is, the conditions that define when an item is actually done.
In short, the Product Owner and development team refine the backlog to ensure it’s sprint-ready.
Draft the sprint goal in advance
The Product Owner needs to draft a sprint goal to give the team a proposed objective before the meeting starts. This saves time compared to creating one from scratch during the meeting. This should only be a simple description of what the team will attempt to achieve by the end of the sprint.
For example:
- By the end of this sprint, we’ll improve the checkout experience by reducing payment failures.
- By the end of this sprint, we’ll give users greater control over project notifications.
Keep in mind that this is simply a draft. You only finalize the goal after the team agrees on it during the meeting. But having a draft keeps the discussion focused and efficient.
The sprint goal should be business- or user-focused, meaning it should describe a benefit for your business or customers. Lastly, your backlog should support it because you’ll pick work items from there.
Prepare your issue templates early
Before sprint planning begins, every issue should meet your team’s Definition of Ready. Sprint planning should focus on deciding what work belongs in the sprint, and not checking whether every issue contains the information developers need. During this meeting, the team focuses on high-level planning decisions. You don’t want them thinking:
- “Did we forget the acceptance criteria for this bug?”
- “Which custom field did we use?”
- “What is our standard epic format?”
Creating recurring issue types with standardized templates helps ensure all your issues follow the same structure. So when the meeting begins, the team can focus on which ones to add to the sprint backlog.
If your team uses recurring issue types (which it most probably does), the Easy Issue Templates for Jira app can help you create templates for them.
Create reusable Jira issue templates with the Easy Issue Templates for Jira app
Easy Issue Templates for Jira allows you to create reusable issue templates from your existing pre-configured issues. Then use those templates to create new issues. The app will pre-fill the fields in your new issues so they’re ready before sprint planning.
So that’s what you need to do before the sprint planning meeting. Now let’s go over how to run sprint planning in Jira.
How to run sprint planning in Jira step-by-step
With your backlog refined, sprint goal drafted, and issue templates ready, you can now plan your sprint in Jira. Here are the steps you’ll follow to run a sprint planning meeting in Jira.
Step 1: Set the sprint goal
As mentioned earlier, the Product Owner drafts a working version of the sprint goal before the meeting. Then during the meeting, the team will refine by:
- Testing the focus to ensure it’s one thing, not several unrelated things.
- Matching it to backlog items.
- Testing it for vagueness. It should be something you can check and verify after the sprint.
Once the whole team agrees on the goal, you can now set it as your sprint goal. In your Scrum project:
- Click Backlog on your Jira dashboard, then click Create Sprint.
- Click on the options button (three dots) in the new sprint you’ve created and select Edit sprint.
- Add a sprint name (optional) and set the sprint duration (usually 2 weeks) in the dialog box that pops up.
4. Write out your final sprint goal in the Sprint goal box and click on Update.
That’s it.
Step 2: Calculate team capacity
Before adding work to the sprint, determine how much work your team can realistically complete in that period. This is called sprint capacity planning. It helps prevent overcommitment and accounts for the time your team is actually available.
You can use the following calculation to estimate this. Start by identifying:
- The number of developers.
- Working days per sprint.
- Productive hours per day.
- Planned leave, meetings, or training.
Then use this formula to estimate how much work the development team can handle in the sprint.
Capacity = (Working days x Hours per day x Team members) x Focus factor
So if you have:
- 5 developers
- 10 working days
- 6 working hours a day
- 70% focus factor.
The sprint capacity would be 210 productive hours.
NOTE: The focus factor is a planning rule of thumb that estimates how many working hours your team will actually be productive. It leaves room for non-productive work like meetings, helping teammates, emails, etc.
Once done, use your team’s historical velocity to translate the available capacity you’ve calculated into a realistic number of story points per sprint.
Step 3: Pull issues from the backlog
Now that you know how many productive hours you can commit to the sprint, you can start adding the work items. In Jira’s Backlog view, drag and drop issues from the project backlog to the sprint backlog, starting with the ones with the highest priority.
As you build the backlog, ensure the team keeps asking:
- Does this issue support our sprint goal?
- Can we realistically complete it in this sprint? (Considering the capacity).
The answer must be yes for the items you add to the sprint backlog.
Step 4: Estimate with story points
To estimate the overall effort needed to implement a sprint backlog item, you’ll use story points. Story points allow you to assign a value to an issue relative to:
- The volume of work.
- How technically difficult the item is.
- How much is unknown. If a requirement is vague or the technology is new to the team, the story point value increases to accommodate that risk.
For this, most Scrum teams use the Fibonacci sequence with these typical values:
- 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.
Lower numbers represent easier work, while larger numbers represent larger, more complex, and more uncertain work. As work becomes larger and more uncertain, the gaps between the estimates increase.
Alternatively, you can also use T-shirt sizing, where instead of numbers, teams will assign a clothing size to each backlog item (XS, S, M, L, XL). To calculate story points, the team will usually map these sizes back to numbers behind the scenes.
After you’re done, remember to compare the total story points against the ones you calculated after capacity planning. This will help you stay within your team’s capacity as you add the sprint backlog.
Step 5: Start the sprint
Once all of this is done, you can now start the sprint. To do this, go to the Jira Backlog view and click on the Start sprint button.
You’ll do this at the end of the sprint planning meeting when everything has been agreed on, and the team is ready to start working.
Jira sprint planning best practices
To have successful sprint planning meetings, you’ll rely on several best practices to keep things focused. We’ve mentioned some of them throughout this guide, and here are some more.
Time-box the meeting
Sprint planning meetings should be just long enough to make informed decisions and nothing more. Generally, you should plan around 1 hour for a two-week sprint and up to 2 hours for a 4-week sprint.
If your meetings go well past these timeframes, it’s often a sign that the work wasn’t prepared properly beforehand. Address this during backlog refinement rather than during the meeting itself.
Use velocity as a guide, not a target
Velocity measures the amount of work the development team successfully delivers during a single sprint. You calculate it by adding up the story points of all product backlog items fully completed by the final day of the sprint.
This metric helps estimate what can realistically be done. But it shouldn’t be used as a performance benchmark, for example, by trying to match the same or exceed the story points the team completed previously. Rather, you should use the average velocity from your last three sprints as a planning reference.
Write acceptance criteria before the meeting
Each issue entering sprint planning should be sprint-ready. A huge part of a Jira issue being sprint-ready is having well-defined acceptance criteria. These are specific conditions the backlog item must satisfy before the Product Owner can consider it complete and acceptable.
The Product Owner is responsible for writing this, and they should do it before the meeting. This way, the team doesn’t have to do it during the meeting and waste time.
Standardize issue creation with templates
Recurring work items such as standard user stories or bug reports tend to follow the same structure. Creating them from scratch every time you need them is not only tiresome, but you’re likely to miss out on some key details.
For these, it only makes sense to standardize how you create them using issue templates.
Standardize your issues using the Easy Issue Templates for Jira app
The Easy Issue Templates for Jira app helps to standardize issue creation for recurring work items. You define an issue to be used as a template. When you use this template to create new issues, the app automatically prefills key details like descriptions, acceptance criteria, custom fields, and other required information.
This way, you’ll have a consistent ticket quality, which means faster planning and fewer mid-sprint blockers. You can save both simple issues and complex epics with child stories, tasks, and bugs as templates. Then use those templates to create a new issue in a single click.
Easy Issue Templates will recreate your complex issue structure easily. This way, the app lets you standardize your issues regardless of the volume of work they represent.
You only define the structure and apply the template. Easy Issue Templates for Jira will handle the rest.
Limit scope changes after kickoff
Avoid adding new work unless it’s genuinely urgent or blocks the team’s progress. Any new work should carry over into the next sprint. This helps your team focus on delivering the work they committed to at the start of the sprint.
Applying these best practices will help your team spend more time agreeing on work that matters and less time resolving preventable issues. Speaking of preventable issues, there are some common mistakes you should avoid when planning sprints in Jira.
Common sprint planning mistakes to avoid
Skipping sprint backlog refinement
Avoid cases where the sprint planning meeting is the first time the team discusses a backlog item. When issues haven’t been refined beforehand, the meeting turns into a discussion about requirements, incomplete estimates, unclear priorities, etc., rather than actual planning.
Setting no sprint goal
The sprint goal guides key planning decisions, such as the backlog items to include. Without one, planning suffers, and the sprint backlog becomes a list of tasks not aimed at achieving a defined objective.
Ignoring team capacity
This is one of the quickest ways to derail a sprint. By ignoring team capacity, you risk committing to more work than the team can realistically complete. The result? You’ll have many unfinished items in the backlog at the end of the sprint.
Letting ticket quality slide
Poorly prepared issues will cause unnecessary delays during sprint planning and when development begins. If developers have to spend the first day of the sprint clarifying requirements or asking for acceptance criteria, those issues weren’t ready for sprint planning.
So, aim to bring only planning-ready issues to the meeting.
Jira sprint planning FAQs
| Q: How long should a sprint planning meeting be? A: A sprint planning meeting should be 1 hour for a 2-week sprint and up to 2 hours for a 4-week sprint. Scrum guidelines recommend no more than 2 hours per sprint week. If your team consistently runs over, the backlog is likely under-refined before the meeting. Q: What is a sprint goal in Jira? A: A sprint goal is a short, outcome-oriented statement that describes what the team aims to deliver by the end of the sprint. In Jira, you set it in the sprint creation dialog in the backlog view. Q: How do you calculate team capacity for sprint planning in Jira? A: Multiply the number of working days in the sprint by the team size, by hours per day, by a focus factor (typically 0.7). For example: 5 developers, 10-day sprint, 6 hours/day, 0.7 focus factor = 210 hours. Convert hours to story points using your team’s average velocity from past sprints. Q: What is the difference between the product backlog and the sprint backlog in Jira? A: The product backlog holds all work that could be done across the life of the product. The sprint backlog contains only the issues selected for the current sprint. In Jira, both are visible in the backlog view: the sprint backlog sits at the top, the product backlog below it. Q: What should be in a Jira issue before sprint planning? A: Every issue entering sprint planning should have a clear title, a description with acceptance criteria, an estimated story point value, and an assignee. Issues that fail this Definition of Ready should stay in the backlog until they are refined. Issue templates help enforce this standard automatically for recurring issue types. Q: Can you change a sprint backlog after the sprint has started? A: Yes, Jira allows adding issues to an active sprint. But this should only be limited togenuine blockers. Frequent mid-sprint changes can deter the team’s focus. Any non-urgent work should go directly into the next sprint’s backlog. |
Conclusion
You need to have effective sprint planning meetings to run successful sprints. Jira provides you with the tools you need to prepare for and run effective sprint planning meetings. This includes refining the backlog, adding a goal, selecting work items, and starting the sprint.
The Easy Issue Templates for Jira app handles the quality side of sprint planning. It lets you standardize issue creation with issue templates. This way, sprint planning meetings kick off with sprint-ready tickets.
Try Easy Issue Templates for free and see how much faster your next sprint planning meeting runs.
