User stories and Sprint planning

User Stories are stories that we jot down during discussion with customers / clients. This will give us a brief idea about the requirement. If you are working with the company who deals with internal products then Product owners will become your customer/ clients. Have a look at Description field in below image to find out some of the basic examples of user stories.



Sprint planning is the task to play with all user stories and make them a well order list. Pre-requisition to start sprint planning is to have your whole team with you in the meeting and your product / project owner’s has clear idea of user stories. Once you have rough list of all user stories, scrum master can initiate with making them perfect order list. One has to take one by one all user sorties and have to discuss them with the team to fill all columns in the sprint planning doc.

Normally there are different patterns to design the doc, but you have to pick one standard format. Please refer image for example. Almost all columns in the image are self explanatory still I would like to explain few.

1) Description – User stories
2) Initial estimate – Depending on complexity and time needed you can rank this column in 1 to 13, in which 13 being highest.
3) Adjusted estimate – After planning if you felt that estimates needs to be updated then put re-estimate in this column.
4) Adjustment factor - Adjusted estimate – initial estimate / initial estimate
5) Value – This will be given by product / project owner / clients i.e. High, Medium or Low

To sum up above, points those needs to be consider while creating this doc are estimates, complexity, priority and owner value. If these factors are not enough, one can also consider Uncertainty, dependencies and frequency of use to have more clear idea.