Sprint planning
Table of Contents
Summary
In agile practice, sprint planning is the ceremony that opens an iteration: the team agrees what the sprint is for, selects the work that serves that goal from the backlog, and breaks it down far enough that execution can start. Good planning is goal-led — the sprint goal filters the backlog, not the other way around.
In ORE Studio, sprint planning is the moment a new sprint acquires its identity. The sprint mission is written first and acts as the filter for everything else: captures are pulled from the next bucket only if they fit the mission and the sprint's size budget, promoted into stories, and decomposed into one-PR tasks. Planning ends when the sprint is ready: mission filled and at least one story BACKLOG-ready.
Detail
Ownership
Owned by System 3. System 5 vets each candidate against the product vision; System 4 sanity-checks the sprint mission against the version mission; System 2 decomposes each promoted story into tasks.
Opening a sprint
A sprint exists when its folder exists. To open sprint N+1:
- Define the sprint mission. One sentence: what this sprint exists to achieve. The mission is the filter that decides whether borderline captures make it in. Write it before looking at the backlog so the choice of stories is led by the mission, not the other way round. See sprint mission.
- Choose stories. Look at the next bucket; pick captures whose
combined size fits one sprint's budget and whose theme matches
the mission. Captures that don't fit the mission stay in the
bucket. Sprints are time-boxed at roughly one mission's worth of
work; the budget is empirical (past sprints' task counts and
elapsed days under
doc/agile/versions/v0/), not a fixed hour-count. - Create the sprint folder. Use compass:
compass add sprint --parent-dir doc/agile/versions/<version>. Slug issprint_NN. - Promote each chosen capture. For each:
git mvthe capture file from its bucket intodoc/agile/versions/<version>/<sprint_NN>/<slug>/story.org.- Flip
#+type:fromcapturetostory. The:ID:is preserved. - Apply the v2 story shape: blurb,
* Goal,* Status(table, stateBACKLOG),* Acceptance,* Tasks(empty),* Decisions,* Out of scope. - Re-run
regenerate_backlog_indexes.py; the entry disappears from the bucket index automatically.
- Decompose stories into tasks. Each task is one PR; see the
sizing rules in Tasks. Generate task files with
compass add task --parent-dir <story-dir>. Order them in the story's* Taskstable by execution order. Tasks startBACKLOG. - Regenerate the version's sprint table on the version page.
When planning is done
The sprint is ready when its Mission is filled and at least one story is BACKLOG-ready (see Stories for story readiness). Execution can begin; planning does not need every story fully decomposed up front.
See also
- Agile process — the loop around the phases.
- Sprint execution — the next phase.
- Open a new sprint — the runbook that drives this phase end-to-end, including closing the previous sprint.
- Product backlog — where candidates come from.
- Sprint themes — how chosen stories are grouped in the sprint backlog.