Backlog grooming and sprint planning

Question

I am new to scrum , I would be happy if you tell me as a scrum master what should I do in a backlog grooming session and when sprint planning happens exactly and how we estimate the amount of time that we need for each item in the backlog and what planning poker estimates exactly.

Answer 1

It's definitely worth looking at the Scrum Guide for some guidance, though that certainly leaves a lot of room for interpretation. For sprint planning, there are three parts, noted here: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#sprint-planning

You're going to want to establish a preliminary sprint goal (the guide notes that it doesn't have to be finalized until the end of planning), then identify which backlog items need to come in to meet that sprint goal, and finally, put together a preliminary plan on how the work will be done. Of course, this is all collaborative. Generally speaking, the PO focuses on the most important work being done first to deliver the most value and the developers focus on what's a reasonable workload and how doing different tasks together may be more effective than others.

Refinement is purposefully vague. It's whatever conversation need to happen to make upcoming Sprint Plannings successful.

Planning poker is a rather broad topic - it is simply a technique for relative estimation. These sizes represent the overall size of an item relative to others. This is not a direct translation to time. Rather, there is a correlation when discussing similar work with a similar team. A great analogy from Mike Cohn is with distance running. A 10k is one size bigger than a 5k, but it doesn't tell us how long a given runner would take and you can't assume that any given runner will take twice as long to run a 10k as they do to run a 5k (or any other clear ratio). However, once someone runs a number of these, you can start making rough time estimates about how long it will take that runner to run similar courses.

Answer 2

Product Backlog refinement is the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items. Scrum master helps the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items. It should be done before Sprint planning and the team should do it frequent basis. In backlog refinement, the Scrum team discusses/refine stories. If possible then assign story points as well(Size estimation, could be t-shirt sizing or story pointing). Story points are provided by taking some small stories as a base story and by comparison we can give story points. Or we can give story points based on work that needs to be done and the efforts it will require. Before starting with the story pointing team should agree on some mutual measuring unit(Can take a story as a base, Required Efforts, many more ways). Usually, it's kind of a rough estimation. It's good if you have some field in your tool to make stories as ready/draft/purposed... The scrum master needs to ensure this session should happen and facilitate the same.
In Planning, Majorly team decides what can be achieved in a sprint. Value of the sprint and plan on how we will be achieving the targets. The team sits together and takeup stories from the refined backlog. Before starting taking up stories team should calculate team capacity by capacity planning. Usually, the team should take up stories that are in a ready state(Means already discussed). Scrum Master facilitate this event. Usually, planning is done by the scrum development team.