At Spartez, we’ve found that when we’re planning the next sprint, going through all the stories in detail during the planning meeting doesn't make sense—it simply leads to an ineffective meeting. This is especially true in Scrum teams of 5 or more people who can complete a significant number of stories in one sprint. The reasons for this differ across teams, but the main one is that with big sprint backlogs, people find it hard to keep the purpose and details of each story fresh in their minds. Another reason is that stories are not usually refined enough to mean the same thing to everyone. Such situations can easily lead to a meeting taken up by explaining basic facts about each story to the team. Nobody wants that.
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One way to encourage your team to prepare for the planning meeting is to simply create an asynchronous session in Agile Poker Enterprise for JIRA. This process is an asynchronous way of implementing the Planning Poker® technique. Select the stories that are likely to hit the next sprint or need refinement and add all your teammates as participants. The add-on will send out an invitation e-mail. The deadline is your next planning meeting. Each person, in their own time, can estimate selected tasks. If anything is unclear or they have something to add, they can comment on their estimation. And they can do it without being biased by others’ opinions.
Estimate more effectively
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